Weeds in the Cultural Garden: Exploring Roots and Tracing Lineages

This chapter develops an extended horticultural metaphor to theorise popular entertainment as a persistent, adaptive, and frequently marginalised force within the cultural landscape. Framed through the figure of the ‘weed’, popular performance is examined as a form that repeatedly emerges across historical periods, thrives in moments of social and political transformation, and survives despite sustained efforts to regulate, aestheticise, or exclude it. Drawing on examples ranging from medieval itinerant entertainers to twentieth-century variety, vaudeville, circus, film, and contemporary outdoor arts, the chapter argues that popular entertainment is best understood not as a peripheral or debased cultural category, but as a vital and historically continuous mode of cultural production shaped by power relations, exclusion, and improvisatory resistance.
The theoretical framework is informed primarily by Michel de Certeau’s distinction between strategies and tactics, reframing cultural authority as the ‘gardener’ that seeks to organise, curate, and legitimate cultural space, and popular performers as ‘weeds’ who exploit cracks within institutional structures. While engaging critically with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, the chapter rejects rhizomatic reproduction as an adequate model for popular entertainment, arguing instead for a process of cross-pollination and hybridisation that generates new forms rather than clones. This emphasis on heterosis, or hybrid vigour, enables a rethinking of creative lineage as dynamic, adaptive, and historically situated rather than linear or canonical.
Methodologically, the chapter employs autoethnography grounded in over three decades of professional practice in outdoor and popular performance. A detailed case study of Syrovy (2001-2024), the author’s longest-running outdoor show, provides an embodied exploration of how popular traditions are transmitted, reworked, and recontextualised through practice. By tracing creative lineages connecting figures such as Buster Keaton, Harpo Marx, and Gene Kelly to contemporary outdoor performance, the chapter demonstrates how popular forms persist through reuse, recombination, and adaptation to new spaces, audiences, and technologies. The analysis foregrounds the importance of live, physical co-presence and the reciprocal performer–audience relationship as defining features of popular performance.
The chapter also interrogates the processes through which popular entertainment is marginalised in contemporary cultural policy and funding structures, particularly through curatorial practices that favour aestheticised or ‘legitimate’ work. Drawing parallels between historical booking circuits and modern commissioning consortia, it argues that collective curation can function as an intensified form of cultural ‘weeding’, narrowing the conditions under which popular forms can survive. In contrast, the chapter highlights the effectiveness of modest, unconditional support structures, such as artist residencies and developmental funding, in enabling popular practices to flourish.
Ultimately, the chapter positions popular entertainment as an enduring, regenerative cultural force whose vitality lies in its illegitimacy, adaptability, and close connection to audiences. By reclaiming the weed as a productive metaphor, it offers a critical framework for understanding how popular performance traditions persist, mutate, and resist incorporation, while posing urgent questions about how cultural ecosystems might better support their continued growth.