The cover of the December 2011 issue of the US magazine Time1 featured a face veiled by a golden cloth. Underneath the title: The Protester. The magazine had declared this persona, the anonymous protester, to be their personality of the year. In doing so, Time magazine wished to honor those, who have committed themselves to the protest movements and claimed the streets as a new site of a democratic culture of participation: from the protests taking place in the Arabic world, to the demonstrations against the budget cutbacks of European governments, against nuclear energy, right up to the Occupy Movement in New York. “There is this contagion of protest”, says Times’ editor-in-chief Richard Stengel. “These people who risked their lives … I think it is changing the world for the better.”2

In these protest movements a new globalized political culture of participation is emerging and operating on a local level in urban spaces. The protesters are demanding a more democratic culture or – in the already established democracies, which I will concentrate on in this text – new forms of participation and involvement3 that go beyond the processes of authorization and legitimization already inherent to representative democracy.

Taking place almost parallel to the emergence of these new public manifestations of a political culture of participation, performers and choreographers, but also established institutions of culture and education, as well as local politicians have (again) been developing a growing interest in participatory performance and choreographic projects in the public sphere since the 1990’s. Artistic distrust of the established institutions of art, such as museums, operas or theaters, has drawn these projects to the public sphere and here in particular to the “non-places”4, such as train stations or airports, the now theatricalized urban spaces of consumer culture, where these projects transform pedestrians into audience. Or these projects take place in marginalized urban areas or municipal institutions, where artists, in most cases, work with the local population or the specific clientele of that institution, which has commissioned the project from them.

This text seeks to demonstrate the interrelationship of these two movements in art and politics existing parallel to each other in time, but otherwise seemingly independent from one another. The main questions that I will look at here are:

How is the term participation defined in these different...