Apprehending everyday rhythms: rhythmanalysis, time-lapse photography, and the space-times of street performance

This paper develops means of apprehending the rhythms of everyday practices and performances. Emerging from the context of recent calls for more explicit engagements with issues surrounding research methods and methodologies in the doing of cultural geography, and in particular in the examination of the geographies of practices, the paper responds to critiques of recent discussions of urban and social rhythms that highlight limitations in the articulation of methods for actually apprehending everyday rhythms. As such, in conversation with Lefebvre’s portrait of the rhythmanalyst and other works interested in the significance of rhythm to social practices, the paper proposes time-lapse photography as a useful component of such a rhythm-analytical, and more generally practice-orientated, methodology. In doing so, the paper draws attention to this method’s ability to document and facilitate the reflection upon the complex durational unfolding of events and the situation of key occurrences within this polyrhythmia. This is illustrated in relation to the everyday rhythms of a specific urban space in Bath, UK and a street magician’s variously successful attempt to intervene into the everyday life of Bath.