back from the brink
alejandro escovedo's show at the el mo on wednesday night was so good, it relieved the sting of having to miss both calexico and wilco last week. it felt like old home week at the el mo- everyone from the toronto alt country scene was there. seeing yvonne matsel and ted footman in the room made me feel as though i was back in my happy days at ted's wrecking yard, like nothing had changed. the first and only other time I saw escovedo was there- and as I line my dates up, that must have been a tour for "a man under the influence," cause that was one of the last shows I saw there. i'm glad to see that five years later they still haven't renovated the building. it stands an empty testimony to what was. okay, okay, i know. this is all very melodramatic, but we all have those venues that mean something more to us than just four walls, don't we? and ted's was mine.
aaaanyhow. escovedo is one of the best live performers I've seen. his touring bands are tight as all get out, and he must bring his own sound cause it's always perfect. rich, sweet, and loud. and this night, he played with all the pathos of someone who's fought death and won. the only drawback to the night was the fact that for some reason they'd set up a bunch of chairs and tables at the front, which put a damper on the movement he teased out of a frigid toronto crowd. i'd just come from a poetry event, so for me, the atmosphere felt positively unhinged by comparison. actually, to be fair, the audience was warm. in fact escovedo said it felt like texas. he probably says that to all the crowds, but i felt a little heart-stir all the same, and the thought of moving to austin began to announce itself as a possibility again to me.
mostly, it just felt good to hear good music again. and it felt really good to see the artistry involved in a reallly good performance. there've been a few comments floating around the blogosphere of late that give voice to a distrust of the slick performance, as if, i don't know, it's a smoke and mirrors act to disguise the fact that there's little substance underneath? a kind of snake oil sales pitch? most recently i saw it on stuart's blog, and someone already raised a friendly eyebrow at his remarks in the comments section. I'm still not entirely sure if I've sussed out the basis for these kinds of objections properly, mostly because I don't understand them. A good performance is no substitute for poor content. A truly good performance *IS* good content. And I'm gearing up to calling bullshit on this divide that keeps getting articulated, the divide between people "just reading" their poems and people performing their poems. The conflation of the slick and the artful performance is also deeply suspect for me. With these thoughts in mind, I'm looking forward to hearing Eileen Myles tonight at This Ain't the Rosedale. I first heard about Eileen Myles this spring when I took the course in the New York School poets from Stuart, and he positively raved about her. So I find it fascinating that she's blurbed as "a virtuoso performer" of her work and "the rock star of modern poetry."
aaaanyhow. escovedo is one of the best live performers I've seen. his touring bands are tight as all get out, and he must bring his own sound cause it's always perfect. rich, sweet, and loud. and this night, he played with all the pathos of someone who's fought death and won. the only drawback to the night was the fact that for some reason they'd set up a bunch of chairs and tables at the front, which put a damper on the movement he teased out of a frigid toronto crowd. i'd just come from a poetry event, so for me, the atmosphere felt positively unhinged by comparison. actually, to be fair, the audience was warm. in fact escovedo said it felt like texas. he probably says that to all the crowds, but i felt a little heart-stir all the same, and the thought of moving to austin began to announce itself as a possibility again to me.
mostly, it just felt good to hear good music again. and it felt really good to see the artistry involved in a reallly good performance. there've been a few comments floating around the blogosphere of late that give voice to a distrust of the slick performance, as if, i don't know, it's a smoke and mirrors act to disguise the fact that there's little substance underneath? a kind of snake oil sales pitch? most recently i saw it on stuart's blog, and someone already raised a friendly eyebrow at his remarks in the comments section. I'm still not entirely sure if I've sussed out the basis for these kinds of objections properly, mostly because I don't understand them. A good performance is no substitute for poor content. A truly good performance *IS* good content. And I'm gearing up to calling bullshit on this divide that keeps getting articulated, the divide between people "just reading" their poems and people performing their poems. The conflation of the slick and the artful performance is also deeply suspect for me. With these thoughts in mind, I'm looking forward to hearing Eileen Myles tonight at This Ain't the Rosedale. I first heard about Eileen Myles this spring when I took the course in the New York School poets from Stuart, and he positively raved about her. So I find it fascinating that she's blurbed as "a virtuoso performer" of her work and "the rock star of modern poetry."
posted by happenin fish at 10:58 AM
15 Comments:
Yes, exactly, a straight up reading is a performance. But a performance also takes place in a particular moment over which it doesn't have complete control. Personally, I find performance more interesting the more it acknowledges this. Hence my suspicion of some versions of slickness.
I wonder if it would make sense to distinguish between open and closed performance (of course most performances would fall somewhere between these two poles).
It's interesting to think of a closed performance that acknowledges itself as such, a performance, for instance, that makes a point of ignoring its audience. (I'm sure this has already happened.)
i think i finally understand the particular distinction you want to make, mark! or maybe i don't. is it as simple as a performance that allows the 4th wall to be broken (i get the idea that it doesn't necessarily need to go out of it's way to do it) versus a performance that actively tries to maintain the 4th wall?
i'd prefer to describe it this way, rather than calling it a peformance that makes a point of ignoring it's audience, which has such a callous, self-involved connotation. when i see performers who actively maintain the spell, who keep this auratic (? is that a word? it's exactly what i mean) distance between me and them, I often feel that they're not doing it inspite of me, but because of me. It's an experience they're creating *for* me.
the idea of open and closed reminds me of the distinction between an open and closed text, and the endless attempts to define a truly interactive textual experience that dominated discussions of digital literature a few years ago. (esp. janet murray, brenda laurel).
I guess, briefly (I'm just stopping in at my computer before I have to be elsewhere), I'm concerned that a tightly scripted, closed performance might be replicating the current dominant mode of eadily consumable spectacle, which tends to treat its audience as a predictable (and I argue) statistical body, whereas a performance could draw on the particularity of the audience and of the moment and expose the conventions and assumption within which it operates.
On the other hand, it's interesting to think of a self-consciously closed performance.
I guess I was thinking of closed and open form as an analogue.
Just realizing that this might not actually clarify anything. More later maybe!
Mark
On the other hand -- and I guess this comes out of my childhood around the theatre -- I question whether there is any such thing as a truly closed performance. One of the things that interests me about performance is that it *cannot* avoid contingency, and in that way could be argued to have an openness that no text can match.
Certainly there are performances that aspire to be closed, and some of them get some way towards achieving it. But even -- to take an extreme example -- if you're putting on a production of Cats or some such thing, a dancer can suddenly fall badly and break an ankle. A trapdoor can be left open. Someone in the audience can jump onstage. A performer can have a crisis and run offstage. Everyone will forget their lines, constantly. All these things happen, and happen often, and the performers must respond instantly and creatively. Part of being a performer is knowing that you are on constant alert for contingency. Mark, this may not seem to you like the kind of aesthetic or philosophical openness that you're looking for, and it's certainly a context that doesn't *welcome* contingency, but still, being aware of and prepared to accept these contingencies gives any performance a quality of openness that a text on a page, for instance, doesn't share.
And everywhere along the spectrum, most if not all performers are constantly "feeling out" the audience -- it's not necessarily overt, but there's always a feedback loop going, where the performer is, while performing, also feeling for audience response and adjusting accordingly; as well as the constant alertness for the unexpected event. A performance that looks closed at a glance may actually represent a very fine emotional calibration between performer and audience (which is a complex relationship, in which power runs both ways quite strongly). I really don't think any performer can treat the audience as predictable -- it's a dynamic relationship even in very scripted performances, and that's one of the reasons that no two performances are ever the same, even with highly scripted formats.
I suppose that if a performance is filmed or recorded, it then becomes closed in the sense that a text on a page is also closed -- the openness existing only in its reception. Even then, it can't be any *more* closed than a text on a page is closed. And until then, it is by definition much more open. So I don't quite see where the distinction actually comes in. I mean, there are lots of extremely good reasons to object to Cats, but to my mind, excessive closure is not one of them. It may aspire to closure, but it will always be more open and more contingent than the most open of printed texts, and that's one of the interesting things about performance in general. It may sometimes be a weakness of performance in general, but I'd argue that it's a different weakness than you're discussing, and maybe even an opposite one.
It may be that part of the reason I don't worry too much about "slickness" in performance is that I'm very aware of that apparent slickness as a precarious dance on the verge of chaos. Am I unusual in perceiving things that way? I don't know. Even if I am, does slickness in performance *necessarily* make the audience less engaged or critical? I'm not sure that, in and of itself, it actually does. If the rest of the content is good, why should a "slick" performance detract? If the rest of the content sucks, well, it just sucks, and slick performance can only go so far in disguising that -- though I think it's at least arguable that, in some cases, a really good performance can add significant meaning to something which, without the performance, may be pretty thin gruel.
--mh
mh,
how finely that is said!
Maggie: Thanks for drawing on your experience. Yeah, as I said, I think most performances fall somewhere between the poles, and, as you point out, the key is probably the aspirations of the performance. I imagine a production of Cats would try to replicate the same spectacle night after night.
I think a closed text is an ideal that doesn't bear out in reality too much either.
Also, slickness is likely beside the point. I can imagine a pretty slick 'open' performance.
It's too hot to think. More later.
Mark
I've definitely been moving in a direction that's a little dangerous for me: theatre is probably the artistic discipline I know least about. However, the idea of performance, I realize and no matter how much at various times I've wished otherwise, is necessarily part of poetry. I want to back up a bit though and talk about why I've resisted calling my own readings performances.
Performance, when it comes to presenting poetry, seems for the most part to connote self-conscious and well-rehersed virtuosity of some kind. I've tended to prefer "straight" readings, and, in fact, I've even tended toward avoiding choosing what I'm going to read until I'm at the mic. My ideal has been an approach in which I am open to the situation, in which, as much as I can be, I'm aware of the mood or moods of the audience and I can respond, not necessarily to satisfy the audience, but to present my work in a meaningful manner. I supposed I'm talking about Maggie's feedback loop. I like, ideally, to keep it front and centre.
I'm aware that a straight poetry reading is peformative, that is, that it's an act heavily coded with convention. I figure that the reading is made up of audience and reader and that in order to translate the work into a live reading, I have to be aware of all three terms (the audience, the reader, the work) and of how each constitutes the others. I like to go by feel in negotiating them. For me, to have a definite plan is to make assumptions about how this dynamic will play out, and inevitably it involves focusing on myself as reader and more or less ignoring the particularity of my audience.
I think a more sophisticated approach to performance would be to focus on the feedback loop and the conventions surrounding it and examine how they're constituted. It seems to me that the configuration that dominates today is that determined by a quasi-statistical model of the audience (hollywood actually uses focus groups and demographic data, I think). The idea under this arrangement is to produce a product that will appeal to a range of people wide enough to ensure profit, and so the creators of the work use tendencies they have previously observed in audiences or have discovered in statistical data. The audience, then, becomes an abstraction, not the particular audience that happens to arrive in the theatre. (As Margaret suggested during Her Poetics, real audiences are likely less predictable.) The work is made to satisfy this audience time after time and reliably. If it's live, it gets rehearsed. It becomes portable, an object, closed. The audience therefore likely gets worked over and possibly ends up turned into the statistical audience. I can imagine a version of performance in which the audience and performer create a different performance situation together, or at least become aware of the terms of the dominant ones.
Thoughts of the top of my head on my lunch, so possibly deranged. That's how I tend to be at lunch.
Mark
I guess what I'm really trying to say is that my own direct and indirect experience of performance is such that I don't see the "statistical audience" as a problem in the way you do -- at least not for any kind of live performance -- for two reasons that I probably didn't quite clearly articulate.
The first (and probably less important, though I spent more words on it) is that even if a performance aspired to complete replicability, the real conditions of performance make this so vanishingly far from ever being possible that it would always remain no more than a kind of mirage-like ambition.
The second, though, is that I doubt that there is any performer in any live performance (theatre, music, poetry reading) out there who really does have a "statistical audience" in mind, because that's the surest way to destroy a live performance. There's a lot that's ambiguous and sometimes worrying about the performer/audience relationship, but all my experience brings me strongly to the sense that it is *always* alive and individual. It's a vital, confused, dynamic, even erotic relationship; there's a lot of power running both ways, which can be used badly or well; but every performer I've ever known experiences every performance as a live and mutual relationship with the audience-as-organism. In fact performers are more likely to feel victimized or controlled by the audience than they are to feel like they have any kind of replicable control over them. A good day is when you and your audience are in synch, and the feedback loop is running strongly both ways. But you can't make the good days happen by yourself, and sometimes there are days when your audience hates you, or just doesn't care, and *nothing* you can do will change that. I've never heard a performer (actor, reader of poetry, whoever) talk in terms of replicable effects, except in minor ways. Thinking like that just doesn't work when you're out there in front of people.
Some performances may interrogate this dynamic more openly, some may call attention to it more than others. But I guess I wanted to suggest that something which may look like it's aiming at a consumable, replicable effect can reflect a lot more (unspoken, subtle) two-way interplay between performer and audience than may be easily apparent, and that live performance just doesn't actually function as a rehearsed and replicable thing.
I guess what I'm saying is that your approach to live performance is, basically, the normal approach. Some people doing poetry readings do prefer to know in advance what they're going to read, and of course actors in a scripted play have a fairly good idea of what they're going to say (though they have to be prepared to improvise when the unexpected happens). But *how* they're going to say it is always open and is going to be affected every time by the feel they're getting from the audience. Musicians have certain songs that they know their core audience will respond to, but they're going to perform those songs at the point in the set that feels right, which won't always be the same, and they're going to do them differently every time, and they won't always do them at all. Anyone who approaches any public performance thinking "this bit always works!" stands an excellent chance of falling flat on her/his face.
Of course I'm talking *only* about live performance, and clearly this doesn't apply the same way to filmed or taped performance, which raises a whole different set of questions. I agree that big budget movies are indeed aiming at a "statistical audience" (though I don't know that the *performers* are, even then; more the producers) -- but I'm not sure that's really true of even the most apparently replicable live performance.
-- mh
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Well, Maggie, I'm talking about something akin to the difference between Cats and Darren O'Donnell's Diplomatic Immunities or Q&A. I think there's a difference in kind to be noted, or at least movement toward one.
Oh, I don't dispute at all that there are huge differences. There may be some disagreement about what those differences are, though.
Anyway, as you said earlier, too hot to think. Maybe more clarity later.
-- mh
I think you keep pulling the discussion back to the awareness of individual performers and using it as stable ground, which is fine, but it's also limiting in my opinion. I tend to think that the quasi-statistical model of audience is so normalized as to be invisible without some form of deliberate exposure.
I'm not saying that a "straight" reading is the way to do it. I just think that, in itself, the reading-as-spectacle approach (without some form of critical self-consciousness involved) might take us in a bad direction in terms of performance.
woa dudes,
came back from the cottage to all this thinking! crazy. i hope you were at least drinking beer.
not much to add here. i think the more i hear you talk about it mark, the more i feel that i just don't agree with you. the dangers you perceive are not a problem for me. and that's fine- let a hundred flowers bloom, and all that. i think it's mostly because i don't feel that the concerns you have are limited to a given style of performance. i think you can find a lack of critical-self consciousness in any public performance, spontaneous or prepared. And i've seen people give spontaneous, unrehearsed performances that were entirely solipsitic affairs.
But I'm also less troubled by the idea of the slick performance- so long as it's not the only kind of performance we create, and I just don't see that as an eventuality. (then again, i loved Les Miserables. granted, I was 17 when i saw it, but i still get shivers when I hear the "one day more" medley).
thinking maybe it's time to revisit benjamin.
Hey IO,
Welcome back. Yes, Maggie and I were completely whaled throughout all of that. Especially Maggie. Man can she pound them back.
Seriously though, no, I don't see virtuosity as a problem in itself, and, yes, happily there are many approaches to performance. I guess I carried my objection to Greg's assertion that a tightening of choreography, etc., is in itself a step forward over here and maybe didn't make that clear. Or maybe I got all keyed up and strayed from that point myself.
Or maybe I did make it clear, and you're still not convinced. In that case, ha, someday I will make you see! (:
What Benjamin are you talking about specifically? I guess I've read the "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Is that what you're thinking of, or can you direct me somewhere else? I admit I'm a little short on my Benjamin reading.
Actually, if you feel like making any connections between the discussion and Benjamin you see explicit, that would be appreciated.
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