Theatre-makers Emily Lim and Dan Canham are staging Public Record, a live performance created with more than 100 New Yorkers, at the open-air Delacorte Theater in Central Park for five nights from this Friday. The project, produced with the Public Theater's Public Works programme, adapts a format the pair first developed in Sunderland, weaving music, dance and spoken word from residents' own stories into a theatrical "record" of the city, and matters as an unusual attempt to capture a place's identity through the voices of ordinary volunteers rather than a scripted narrative.

Around 350 New Yorkers took part in workshops and surveys roughly a year ago, with the final cast, aged seven to 84, drawn largely from volunteers across the five boroughs alongside a small number of professional musicians and dancers. Playwright Lisa Sanaye Dring helped shape the material into a 12-track structure with sections such as Birth Certificate and Karaoke, while Brooklyn collective Papi Juice contributes a live-mixed nightlife segment; the makers say the piece has become less about telling New York's whole story, seen as impossible given its scale, and more focused on its people and communities.