May 26, 2005
Notes on
Jonathan Shannon
Sultans of Spin
World stage, examining how musical performance practices that are represented as authentic local traditions obtain both their authenticity and their local specificity through their staging in global contexts.
The sites of performance and consumption of world music are ‘heterotopic’: fraught with disjunctures between the comepting authenticities and realities promoted and consumed by artists, audiences, and culture brokers operating within the shadows of the transnational music industry.
The result of succesful framing of a musical performance is the creation and promotion of a distinct understanding and experience of style. Meyer defined style as consisting of replicable patterns of formal musical elements such as melody, rhythm, texture, timbre, instrumentation and voice. There are new extra-musical associations such as: venue, costume, audience, audience-performer interactions, and appropriate co-occurrence or coperformance rules, among others.
...analysis of the supposed reality behind the representation reveals further layers of representations, the entire complex being built on a fundamental deferral of meaning, in derrida’s sense; thus, the referent of the real does not exist except as a series of representations.
The world stage is structured by the representation practices inherent to the ‘global imagination’of the (post)modern condition in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The complexes of signs, texts, and representations of the global imagination are themselves intimately involved in the processes of production, distribution and consumption of global cultural forms.
The performance of al-Kindi in New York City thus can be understood in part as an actualization of the world stage principle: a staging of a music-dance complex constructed, rehearsed, and performed for a transnational audience of consumers.
...the ‘local’ and the ‘authentic’ in world music circuits are often those cultural practices which can best be packaged and presented globally.
Often it is musical cultures that are marginal or forgotten within their sites of local origin that are most easily appropriated for this role in the world music market, as in the case of the ‘Master Musicians of Jajouka’.
Notes on
Susan Reed
The Politics and poetics of dance
Kealiinohomoku demonstrated how dance scholars’ blanket categorization of non-Western dances as ethnic, folk, or primitive was based on an evolutionary paradigm in which Western theatrical dance, especially ballet emerged as ‘…the one great divinely ordained apogee of the performing arts.’
Poole shows how, despite the transformations in costumes, props and gestures, Andean dance retained characteristic movement patterns that embedded concepts of social hierarchy and social time fundamentally distinct from those of Europeans. Matachines dance derives from Medieval European folk dramas and was brought to the new world by the Spanish, with the purpose of Christianizing the Indians.
Dance is a powerful tool in shaping nationalist ideology and in the creation of national subjects, often more so than are political rhetoric or intellectual debates.
Political ideologies play a critical role in the selection of national dances. E.g. China’s cultural Revolution adoption of ballet because of its narrative possibilitse, movement vocabularies that stressed strength and action, and its flexibility in expressing gender equality through movement. Cuban Rumba was selected almost exclusively for ideological reasons related to its identity with a particular community-the lower-class, dark-skinned workers of Cuba.
…the ‘ossification’ and standardization of the Catalan sardana is an indicator of the legitimate defense of the Catalans against the threat of Castilian cultural hegemony in Spain.
Dance has been in many societies one of the few sites where women can legitimately perform in public.
Notes on
Royce
Towards an anthropology of performing arts
We have recognized ritual and social drama as condensed presentations of and commentary about institutions and values. Now we must recognize movement, dance, theater, and performance as forms that are at once the most and the least resistant to distortion and misappropriation.
Aesthetics of experience: the tacit cultural forms, values and sensibilities- local ways of being and doing- that lend specific styles, configurations, and felt qualities to local experiences.
Virtuosity is based upon mastery of a technique described by a codified vocabulary.
Technique, or the rules of a genre, is what one must master. Techniques are specific to genres. They are created from very different selections of elements out of an almost limitless number of possibilities.
Technique, discipline, and artistry create the forms within which performers craft their interpretations. What all performing arts share is their interpreting function. All interpretation is a departure from the original yet it is crucial if we are to forge any understanding at all of things that matter.
The arts of music, dance and theatre are ones that exist as designs in space and time. They are manifested in performance, interpreted by performers that have mastered the techniques of the genres. Meaning recites both in the intrinsic qualities of form and the extrinsic qualities of content and context.
How audiences assess performances involves the reception of meaning but also judgements based upon skill and artistry.
Notes on
Richard Green
(Up)Staging the primitive: Pearl Primus and “the Negro Problem” in American Dance
Green will try to go beyond the notion that art merely ‘mirrors’ reality and to explore some of the ways in which it possibly functions to realize racial identities and political constituencies...in this case in role of the Negro in American concert dance.
Despite her ‘genuine’ modern training, ‘race’ still clings to Primus in performance; to the reviewer’s delight, she just cannot escape from giving the audience numbers that are more Negro than those presented by an African...the emphasis on race in relation to dance themes and styles haunted Primus’s career from almost the beginning.
...the Negro’s potentialfor artistic success was always delimited by the critic’s racialized expectations, however complimentary those expectations might be.
While in Africa, Primus was often recognized by her movement style as kin, as belonging to that continent. This experience of mutual recognition reaffirmed Primus’s belief that African Americans had retained some part of their African heritage, in spite of the traumatic cultural shock of bodies moving along the middle passage into slavery in the Americas.
*Not unlike the body of land called Africa in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Primus’s body represented an(O)ther dark site for the projection of primitive fantasies.
Primus literally embodied the suffering and injustices that others could only attempt to portray. Her representations of Negro problems operated not only on a thematic level but also on a physical one. Primus’s dance offers a counterhegemonic narrative of identity by placing the Negro on the grand stage of inherited historical tradition.
...artistic productions by marginalized subjects can reinforce systems of oppression and structures of domination, but they can also contest and pull at the borders separating ‘blacks’ from ‘whites’, the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’...There is nothing like distance to create objectivity, and exclusion gives rise to counter values.
Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation.
Notes on
Steven feld
Sound and Sentiment
Kaluli/Bosavi
About 2000, tropical rainforest North of Mount Bosavi; Great Papuan Plateau. Southern Highlands of Papua New guinea. Bosavi Language. More or less egalitarian. Horticulturalists; hunting and fishing. Patrilineal descent. Patrilocal residency. Gisalo ceremony: guests sing sad songs to move the host to weep. ecological adaptation, acoustemology.
Relationship between place, ecolog, sound pehnomena, and culture.
Intimate relationship between sound structure and social structure.
Analyzing these relationships ethnographically and theoretically.
-Myths that reinforce cultural ideas...the muni bird=reciprocity. Reinforcing also human realm and bird realm. Strong emotions.
birds are the voices of the ancestors.
when singing, trying to sound like birds which is associated with death, loss and abandonment.
Almost everything is a lamentation.
Feld’s postscript is important because reminds the reader of Dialogic editing and the ‘crisis’ of ethnographic representation (snooze)
also about the partial truths as said by Clifford, and the ethnographic knowledge which leaves out myths and other influences.
Notes on
Richard Bauman
Poetics and Performance
Performance-based research shares some of the central goals of deconstruction, reader-response and reception theories, hermeneutics, the poetics and politics of ethnographic texts, and cultural studies.
Performance provides a frame that invites critical reflection on communicative processes.
Language as ‘mode of action’ rather than primarily a ‘means of thinking’
Participation structure, particularly the nature of turn-taking and performer-audience interaction, can have profound implications for shaping social relations.
The illocutionary forceof an utterance often emerges not simply from its placement within a particular genre and social setting but also from the indexical relations between the performance and other speech events that precede and succeded it.
Western theories of language and poetics pressuppose Western metaphysics.
Two problems inherent in the concept of context: inclusiveness and false objectivity.
The movement from context to contextualization and related concern thus enables us to recognize the sophisticated way that performers and audiences use poetic patterning in interpreting the structure and significance of their own discourse.
The basic conceptual and methodological premise of the ethnography of performance is that the structure and dynamics of the performance event serve to orient the participants-including the performer.
entextualization is the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit-a text- that can be lifted out of its interactional setting.
Mapping the dimensions of transformation: Framing, Form, Function, Indexical grounding, translation, emergent structure (of the new context).
Notes on
Barbara Browning
Samba
Samba as a form that narrates a history of cultural contact betweem Africans, Europeans, and indigenous Brazilians. Candomblé dances are understoos to be embodiments not on the expressive potential of individual dancers but rather of the principles of belief which bind a community together. Capoeira embodies a history of racial struggle.
Spirituality in African Brazil doesn’t exclude notions of polotics or aesthetics-or even, for that matter, of sexuality.
Samba is the dance of the body articulate. The dance is a complex dialogue in which various parts of the body talk at the same time, and in seemingly different languages. The message is narrative and lyrical. The dyachrony of the layering of rhytmic times complicates all accounts of historical events, such as the collonization of Brazil, the suppression of indigenous peoples and cultures, and the period of the enslavement of African peoples, which lasted longer in Brazil than in any other nation in the New World. All these elements call into question the popular myth of Brazilian racial equity. The lyricism of the samba is its incorporation of figures that flash across time. Rhtymic and gestural vocabulary can endure, but it is not merely frozen in time, it can refer to ruptures in historical time, rythmic disjunction and it can figure itself in relation to its past. The body says what cannot be spoken-syncopation. The afoxés in candomble invoke political significance and embody aesthetic power. the caboclo is an emblem in Afro-Brazilian culture of the refusal to be or remain a captive. Many of capoeira’s maneuvers are inversions, whether literal, ironic, physical or linguistic. The protective roda has been a charged space for cultural transmission and creativity. Every political rally in Brazil degenerates into music after its inception.
Homi Bhabha: Counter narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries-both actual and conceptual-disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essential identities. It is the capacity of the dancing woman to embody her own spirituality and sexuality that counters western perceptions of patriarchal subordination in the Third World.
Notes on
Richard Bauman
Story, Performance, and Event
...basic reorientation from a conception of folklore as things- texts, items, mentifacts- to verbal art as a way of speaking, a mode of verbal communication.
Bauman’s subject matter is oral storytelling. Oral narrative provides an especially rich focus for the investigation of the relationship between oral literature and social life becuase part of the special nature of narrative is to be doubly anchored in human events. that is, narratives are keyed both to the events in which they are told and to the events that they recount, towards narrative events and narrated events. Oral performance is situtaed, its form, meaning, and functions rooted in culturally defined scenes or events-bounded segments of the flow of behavior and experience that constitute meaningful contexts for action, interpretation, and evaluation.
Consideration of truth and belief will vary and be subject to negotiation within communities and story-telling situations. the aesthetic consideration of artistic performance may demand the embellishment or manipulation-if not the sacrifice-of the literal truth in the interests of greater dynamic tension, formal elegance, surprise value, contrast, or other elements that contribute to excellence in performance in this subculture. Fabrication-both enacted and narrated-represent a fertile field for the exploration of the interrelationships binding together the narrated event, the narrative itself, and the evnt in which the narrative is recounted. If we are to develop our understanding of those stories we have labeled personal experience narratives, thereby implicating the relationship between narrative and event and the management of point of view, then it is crucial that we set about investigating those dimensions of relationship directly, bolstering our social and linguistic insights with the literary ones, toward a deeper and more nuanced comprehension of the forms and functions of this powerful expressive vehicle.
Structure: Orientation->setup->trick event->discrediting of the fabrication->evaluation.
The relationship between story and event in these narratives thus turns out to be reciprocal, not in some vague, general ineffable sense but in ways that can be demonstrated on the levels of content and structure.
Of all the devices by which the fusion of narrated event and narrative event is effected in narrative discourse, reported speech is perhaps the most sociolinguistically interesting. The speaking person in the novel is always to one degree or another, an ideologue, and his words are always ideologomes...It is precisely as ideologemes that discourse becomes the object of representation in the novel.
Jonathan Shannon
Sultans of Spin
World stage, examining how musical performance practices that are represented as authentic local traditions obtain both their authenticity and their local specificity through their staging in global contexts.
The sites of performance and consumption of world music are ‘heterotopic’: fraught with disjunctures between the comepting authenticities and realities promoted and consumed by artists, audiences, and culture brokers operating within the shadows of the transnational music industry.
The result of succesful framing of a musical performance is the creation and promotion of a distinct understanding and experience of style. Meyer defined style as consisting of replicable patterns of formal musical elements such as melody, rhythm, texture, timbre, instrumentation and voice. There are new extra-musical associations such as: venue, costume, audience, audience-performer interactions, and appropriate co-occurrence or coperformance rules, among others.
...analysis of the supposed reality behind the representation reveals further layers of representations, the entire complex being built on a fundamental deferral of meaning, in derrida’s sense; thus, the referent of the real does not exist except as a series of representations.
The world stage is structured by the representation practices inherent to the ‘global imagination’of the (post)modern condition in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The complexes of signs, texts, and representations of the global imagination are themselves intimately involved in the processes of production, distribution and consumption of global cultural forms.
The performance of al-Kindi in New York City thus can be understood in part as an actualization of the world stage principle: a staging of a music-dance complex constructed, rehearsed, and performed for a transnational audience of consumers.
...the ‘local’ and the ‘authentic’ in world music circuits are often those cultural practices which can best be packaged and presented globally.
Often it is musical cultures that are marginal or forgotten within their sites of local origin that are most easily appropriated for this role in the world music market, as in the case of the ‘Master Musicians of Jajouka’.
Notes on
Susan Reed
The Politics and poetics of dance
Kealiinohomoku demonstrated how dance scholars’ blanket categorization of non-Western dances as ethnic, folk, or primitive was based on an evolutionary paradigm in which Western theatrical dance, especially ballet emerged as ‘…the one great divinely ordained apogee of the performing arts.’
Poole shows how, despite the transformations in costumes, props and gestures, Andean dance retained characteristic movement patterns that embedded concepts of social hierarchy and social time fundamentally distinct from those of Europeans. Matachines dance derives from Medieval European folk dramas and was brought to the new world by the Spanish, with the purpose of Christianizing the Indians.
Dance is a powerful tool in shaping nationalist ideology and in the creation of national subjects, often more so than are political rhetoric or intellectual debates.
Political ideologies play a critical role in the selection of national dances. E.g. China’s cultural Revolution adoption of ballet because of its narrative possibilitse, movement vocabularies that stressed strength and action, and its flexibility in expressing gender equality through movement. Cuban Rumba was selected almost exclusively for ideological reasons related to its identity with a particular community-the lower-class, dark-skinned workers of Cuba.
…the ‘ossification’ and standardization of the Catalan sardana is an indicator of the legitimate defense of the Catalans against the threat of Castilian cultural hegemony in Spain.
Dance has been in many societies one of the few sites where women can legitimately perform in public.
Notes on
Royce
Towards an anthropology of performing arts
We have recognized ritual and social drama as condensed presentations of and commentary about institutions and values. Now we must recognize movement, dance, theater, and performance as forms that are at once the most and the least resistant to distortion and misappropriation.
Aesthetics of experience: the tacit cultural forms, values and sensibilities- local ways of being and doing- that lend specific styles, configurations, and felt qualities to local experiences.
Virtuosity is based upon mastery of a technique described by a codified vocabulary.
Technique, or the rules of a genre, is what one must master. Techniques are specific to genres. They are created from very different selections of elements out of an almost limitless number of possibilities.
Technique, discipline, and artistry create the forms within which performers craft their interpretations. What all performing arts share is their interpreting function. All interpretation is a departure from the original yet it is crucial if we are to forge any understanding at all of things that matter.
The arts of music, dance and theatre are ones that exist as designs in space and time. They are manifested in performance, interpreted by performers that have mastered the techniques of the genres. Meaning recites both in the intrinsic qualities of form and the extrinsic qualities of content and context.
How audiences assess performances involves the reception of meaning but also judgements based upon skill and artistry.
Notes on
Richard Green
(Up)Staging the primitive: Pearl Primus and “the Negro Problem” in American Dance
Green will try to go beyond the notion that art merely ‘mirrors’ reality and to explore some of the ways in which it possibly functions to realize racial identities and political constituencies...in this case in role of the Negro in American concert dance.
Despite her ‘genuine’ modern training, ‘race’ still clings to Primus in performance; to the reviewer’s delight, she just cannot escape from giving the audience numbers that are more Negro than those presented by an African...the emphasis on race in relation to dance themes and styles haunted Primus’s career from almost the beginning.
...the Negro’s potentialfor artistic success was always delimited by the critic’s racialized expectations, however complimentary those expectations might be.
While in Africa, Primus was often recognized by her movement style as kin, as belonging to that continent. This experience of mutual recognition reaffirmed Primus’s belief that African Americans had retained some part of their African heritage, in spite of the traumatic cultural shock of bodies moving along the middle passage into slavery in the Americas.
*Not unlike the body of land called Africa in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Primus’s body represented an(O)ther dark site for the projection of primitive fantasies.
Primus literally embodied the suffering and injustices that others could only attempt to portray. Her representations of Negro problems operated not only on a thematic level but also on a physical one. Primus’s dance offers a counterhegemonic narrative of identity by placing the Negro on the grand stage of inherited historical tradition.
...artistic productions by marginalized subjects can reinforce systems of oppression and structures of domination, but they can also contest and pull at the borders separating ‘blacks’ from ‘whites’, the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’...There is nothing like distance to create objectivity, and exclusion gives rise to counter values.
Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation.
Notes on
Steven feld
Sound and Sentiment
Kaluli/Bosavi
About 2000, tropical rainforest North of Mount Bosavi; Great Papuan Plateau. Southern Highlands of Papua New guinea. Bosavi Language. More or less egalitarian. Horticulturalists; hunting and fishing. Patrilineal descent. Patrilocal residency. Gisalo ceremony: guests sing sad songs to move the host to weep. ecological adaptation, acoustemology.
Relationship between place, ecolog, sound pehnomena, and culture.
Intimate relationship between sound structure and social structure.
Analyzing these relationships ethnographically and theoretically.
-Myths that reinforce cultural ideas...the muni bird=reciprocity. Reinforcing also human realm and bird realm. Strong emotions.
birds are the voices of the ancestors.
when singing, trying to sound like birds which is associated with death, loss and abandonment.
Almost everything is a lamentation.
Feld’s postscript is important because reminds the reader of Dialogic editing and the ‘crisis’ of ethnographic representation (snooze)
also about the partial truths as said by Clifford, and the ethnographic knowledge which leaves out myths and other influences.
Notes on
Richard Bauman
Poetics and Performance
Performance-based research shares some of the central goals of deconstruction, reader-response and reception theories, hermeneutics, the poetics and politics of ethnographic texts, and cultural studies.
Performance provides a frame that invites critical reflection on communicative processes.
Language as ‘mode of action’ rather than primarily a ‘means of thinking’
Participation structure, particularly the nature of turn-taking and performer-audience interaction, can have profound implications for shaping social relations.
The illocutionary forceof an utterance often emerges not simply from its placement within a particular genre and social setting but also from the indexical relations between the performance and other speech events that precede and succeded it.
Western theories of language and poetics pressuppose Western metaphysics.
Two problems inherent in the concept of context: inclusiveness and false objectivity.
The movement from context to contextualization and related concern thus enables us to recognize the sophisticated way that performers and audiences use poetic patterning in interpreting the structure and significance of their own discourse.
The basic conceptual and methodological premise of the ethnography of performance is that the structure and dynamics of the performance event serve to orient the participants-including the performer.
entextualization is the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit-a text- that can be lifted out of its interactional setting.
Mapping the dimensions of transformation: Framing, Form, Function, Indexical grounding, translation, emergent structure (of the new context).
Notes on
Barbara Browning
Samba
Samba as a form that narrates a history of cultural contact betweem Africans, Europeans, and indigenous Brazilians. Candomblé dances are understoos to be embodiments not on the expressive potential of individual dancers but rather of the principles of belief which bind a community together. Capoeira embodies a history of racial struggle.
Spirituality in African Brazil doesn’t exclude notions of polotics or aesthetics-or even, for that matter, of sexuality.
Samba is the dance of the body articulate. The dance is a complex dialogue in which various parts of the body talk at the same time, and in seemingly different languages. The message is narrative and lyrical. The dyachrony of the layering of rhytmic times complicates all accounts of historical events, such as the collonization of Brazil, the suppression of indigenous peoples and cultures, and the period of the enslavement of African peoples, which lasted longer in Brazil than in any other nation in the New World. All these elements call into question the popular myth of Brazilian racial equity. The lyricism of the samba is its incorporation of figures that flash across time. Rhtymic and gestural vocabulary can endure, but it is not merely frozen in time, it can refer to ruptures in historical time, rythmic disjunction and it can figure itself in relation to its past. The body says what cannot be spoken-syncopation. The afoxés in candomble invoke political significance and embody aesthetic power. the caboclo is an emblem in Afro-Brazilian culture of the refusal to be or remain a captive. Many of capoeira’s maneuvers are inversions, whether literal, ironic, physical or linguistic. The protective roda has been a charged space for cultural transmission and creativity. Every political rally in Brazil degenerates into music after its inception.
Homi Bhabha: Counter narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries-both actual and conceptual-disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essential identities. It is the capacity of the dancing woman to embody her own spirituality and sexuality that counters western perceptions of patriarchal subordination in the Third World.
Notes on
Richard Bauman
Story, Performance, and Event
...basic reorientation from a conception of folklore as things- texts, items, mentifacts- to verbal art as a way of speaking, a mode of verbal communication.
Bauman’s subject matter is oral storytelling. Oral narrative provides an especially rich focus for the investigation of the relationship between oral literature and social life becuase part of the special nature of narrative is to be doubly anchored in human events. that is, narratives are keyed both to the events in which they are told and to the events that they recount, towards narrative events and narrated events. Oral performance is situtaed, its form, meaning, and functions rooted in culturally defined scenes or events-bounded segments of the flow of behavior and experience that constitute meaningful contexts for action, interpretation, and evaluation.
Consideration of truth and belief will vary and be subject to negotiation within communities and story-telling situations. the aesthetic consideration of artistic performance may demand the embellishment or manipulation-if not the sacrifice-of the literal truth in the interests of greater dynamic tension, formal elegance, surprise value, contrast, or other elements that contribute to excellence in performance in this subculture. Fabrication-both enacted and narrated-represent a fertile field for the exploration of the interrelationships binding together the narrated event, the narrative itself, and the evnt in which the narrative is recounted. If we are to develop our understanding of those stories we have labeled personal experience narratives, thereby implicating the relationship between narrative and event and the management of point of view, then it is crucial that we set about investigating those dimensions of relationship directly, bolstering our social and linguistic insights with the literary ones, toward a deeper and more nuanced comprehension of the forms and functions of this powerful expressive vehicle.
Structure: Orientation->setup->trick event->discrediting of the fabrication->evaluation.
The relationship between story and event in these narratives thus turns out to be reciprocal, not in some vague, general ineffable sense but in ways that can be demonstrated on the levels of content and structure.
Of all the devices by which the fusion of narrated event and narrative event is effected in narrative discourse, reported speech is perhaps the most sociolinguistically interesting. The speaking person in the novel is always to one degree or another, an ideologue, and his words are always ideologomes...It is precisely as ideologemes that discourse becomes the object of representation in the novel.
