[Dancecult-l] liveness, perfomativity, theatre

[slightly muddy]

This thread started with my (I thought simple!) question as to whether 
the UK resurgence in "live" music was reflected elsewhere. The sense of 
"live" here was mainly that of instrument based "band music" which seems 
to predominate in the popularity stakes at. present. There are, I think, 
a couple of points to pick up here.

Said band music generally involves a degree of theatricality on the part 
of performers. Although I suspect that for many "rock" musicians they 
wouldn't want to see their performances as theatrical (since this would 
conflict with their notion of authentic playing) there has always been 
this strand of theatre or showmanship in pop/rock. Conversely, DJing, 
laptop performance or the kinds of performance of say orbital, 
underworld etc. are not intrinsically theatrical. Indeed if we think of 
the ethos of dance/techno around the late 80s early 90s, the emphasis 
was distinctly against the performer/star ethos, vis the numerous white 
label discs and essentially annonymous records. Equally, one might argue 
that the DJ was not there to be a star but gained a reputation by 
providing a thread of music that kept people dancing. The idea of the 
star DJ of the likes of Paul Oakenfold or Mike Pickering came somewhat 
later.

Where dance wasn't the focus, in my experience, performers compensated 
for a lack of theatricality by providing videos either programmed or 
VJed. But personally I've never felt that this worked as a performance. 
Equally, it has to be said, "live" performacne has also incorporated 
video either as a mediation of onstage performance or as an addition 
thereto. Mark Butler mentions Auslander's book (well worth reading); it 
seems to me one of the key points auslander makes in this context is how 
this extension of "live" performance can be seen as a re-mediation of 
the rock/pop video - performers recreating "live" what they have done on 
video.

One interesting point that hasn't come out explicitly in the discussion 
so far is this; several postings have discussed the performativity of 
DJing etc. At one extreme we have Aphex twin on his sofa, but DJing 
laptop performance can also be a performance, the key point being that 
it is largely and *aural* as opposed to visual one. This is no doubt one 
of the main consequences of technological change; unlike the use of 
conventional instruments, electronic performances may not have a great 
deal of visual content. Granted that Keith Emersons "Hammond raping" was 
just as theatrical Hendricx or Pete Townsend, even the conventional 
keyboard player has less means of theatricality than guitarists, 
drummers etc. Hence the vogue, at one time, for keyboards "worn" around 
the neck, so to speak.

Ultimately, I think, there are just some kinds of music that are less 
well suited to live performance than others, and that this is a function 
of the development of recording - as Theodore Gracyk (Rhythm and Noise 
1999)  says, recording is something that is ontologically different from 
performance. Eliot Bates mentions academic electronic music in the 50 
and certainly, from my recent reading, there was a similar controversy 
here too where John Cage and others questioned the idea of the simple 
playing of tape music as qualifying as a performance,

"I was at a concert of electronic music in Cologne and I noticed that 
even though it was the most recent electronic music, the audience was 
all falling asleep. No matter how interesting the music was, the 
audience couldn't stay awake. That was because the music was coming out 
of loudspeakers. Then, in 1958-the Town Hall program of mine-we were 
rehearsing the Williams Mix, which is not an uninteresting piece, and 
the piano tuner came in to tune the piano. Everyone's attention went 
away from the Williams Mix to the piano tuner because he was /live/." 
(Cage interviewed by thom holmes for Electronic and Experimental  Music 
2002 Routledge)

P G-B