Drawing a Circle in the Square: Street Performing in New York's
Washington Square Park by Sally Harrison-Pepper This gratifying study of
a phenomenon that has imprinted itself upon the folklore of big-city
life is a joyful book focusing upon the street performers in Washington
Square Park in New York City. While documenting the complex expressions
of street performance in a specific outdoor environment over a period of
four years, Drawing a Circle in the Square gives a broad examination to
the relationship between outdoor performance and urban culture. In this
book we learn that most American cities prohibit street performance,
charging such entertainers with vagrancy, soliciting, or disturbing the
peace. Yet the street performer-joyfully, cautiously,
heroically-persists. On sidewalks throughout the country, in theatres
reduced to their barest essentials, the performer juggles, blows fire,
performs magic, and tells jokes, appealing both to our sense of humor
and to our longing for a moment of spontaneity in our city-structured
lives. Drawing a Circle in the Square is the first scholarly
documentation and analysis of street performance. Based primarily upon
original research, it makes a contribution that is as much toward a mode
of performance literature as toward a particular subject. Promoting the
study of performance as an important and valuable vehicle for
interdisciplinary research and thought, it is a model of the kinds of
research being developed in the emerging field of performance studies.
Sally Harrison-Pepper is a professor of interdisciplinary studies at
Miami University in Ohio.
