The Theater of the People: A look into Queens Street Vending Culture

The Theater of the People project recognizes street vendors in Queens, Corona Plaza as merely the visible performance of a network of distributed and transient actors and social infrastructure. Simultaneously, an actual theater sits between a public plaza and a public park, offering a potential political, economic and social connection between the two public arenas. What can a building built for performance teach us when it becomes a scaffold for an entirely different play? How might we imagine a Theater for the People? Within the practice of everyday life, street vendors produce an inherently social space that’s embodied, processual, rhetorical, and political. What happens when a theater, a space of leisure that gives pleasure from the art of fiction, becomes the backdrop for the script of the street vendor? What would a space for the state-less look like? What role would the politics of aesthetics have in such a place? By portraying these relations and connections of everyday life interactions within public spaces, we can think of ways to invent new, inclusive futures.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AIA.Inter.21.25

Volume Editors
Rico Quirindongo & Georgeen Theodore

ISBN
978-1-944214-39-5