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Category: performance

Against Perfection: Musicians no longer seem to know what music is

Published March 23, 2008 by cgerrish

45 RPM Vinyl Record

For the record, music is not recorded music. A photograph of a painting is not a painting. A video of a play is not a play. Seeing a symphony in person is not the same as listening to a CD. In point of fact, the digital itself is a copy at it’s origin, it never inhabits time the same way as the performing arts. The digital replicates without effort, cost, talent or skill. Compare and contrast to performing music live, acting in a play, painting a new work.

Because a large industry has grown up around selling recordings, the recordings are often confused with the thing recorded. Of course there are recorded works that only exist as recordings and cannot actually be performed. Then there are records put out by musicians who can’t actually play their music live. But once these recordings exist in digital format, it’s nothing to make an extra copy or two. Or ten thousand or a million.

The great thing about music is that it’s different every time. That’s why we go to see plays and operas we’ve seen before, see bands we’ve seen before. It was the recording industry that taught consumers that there was only one version of a song, the one they were selling. And that was the moment where musicians were cut off from their music. Recordings create an artificial kind of perfection that stands outside of life. Life is imperfect, filled with mistakes, errors, moments of passion and virtuosity. Recordings can simulate the depth of life, but cannot capture the living.

As the cost of making and distributing recordings continues to approach zero, musicians need to understand what the digital means to them. It could mean you’ve got many versions of the same song: the unplugged version, the one you did in Austin, the desperate one you recorded in that little club in New York. The one where that great harmonica player sat in and changed the way you thought about the melody. It could mean multiple mixes, it could mean letting the fans create their own mixes. Or even computer-generated random mixes. Let a thousand flowers bloom and capture all the beautiful moments of imperfection in all their glory.

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A Hawk and A Hacksaw: Modern Gypsy Music

Published February 11, 2008 by cgerrish

The soundtrack to Fortunes of War has inspired a life long quest to find a certain kind of gypsy music. The latest stop on my journey is a very satisfying one. If you don’t know about A Hawk & a Hacksaw, click on the video above and listen. NPR’s The World also ran a nice story on the group. They hail from Albuquerque, but the music is in the tradition of the Hungary and Romania.

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Boundaries bleed, frames erased: Deep Trance in Potatoland

Published January 27, 2008 by cgerrish

Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland

Kills me to miss even one of Richard Foreman’s productions. The digerati think they understand multimedia, but until you’ve experienced one of Foreman’s Theater Machines you don’t understand the potential of multiple media. If you live in the New York City area, secure tickets immediately to see Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland. The New York Times provides a nice photo gallery of the production and Ben Brantley provides a review of the performance. Foreman integrates digital film, live performance, non-linear text, funhouse sets and explosive thought into an evening of the highest form of entertainment.

At the other end of the spectrum is The Flea Theater’s production of Peter Handke’s “Offending The Audience.”  A group of actors take the stage and announce that there will be no play. They are not characters. The stage does not represent another place. Time passes as it does in real life. There is no illusion.

Foreman goes to the maximum, stuffing the stage with imagery, words, visions, poetry; Handke strips it all away, exposes the real moment of time existing between performers and audience, and then he takes that opportunity to tell us what he thinks of us. Boundaries bleed, frames are erased, we experience a shock to the deep trance of our lives.

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Akropolis: Toward a Poor Video, or can YouTube be more?

Published January 7, 2008 by cgerrish

Looking at a film like “Atonement” with very rich production values brings to mind the work of avant-garde theater director Jerzy Grotowski. His work was the opposite. He developed a concept and a practice called the “Poor Theater.” It’s principles are:

  • Eliminate, not teach something (Via Negativa).
    • This can be described as a basic philosophy for actor training that essentially says the actor’s main task involves not accruing skills so much as eradicating obstacles that get in the way of being true.
  • Enhance that which already exists.
  • Create all that is needed for the play in the actor’s body, with little use of props.
  • Promote rigorous physical and vocal training of actors
  • Avoid the beautiful if it does not foster truth

While it’s true that the cost of video production has plummeted, the cost of putting something truly interesting in front of a camera remains the same. For Grotowski there was a physical cost, a spiritual cost and the high price of artistic discipline. Although perhaps it’s as David Lynch has recently described it, “you think you’ve had an experience watching a movie on a telephone, but you haven’t. It’s such a sadness”Could YouTube live and thrive in the ceremony of the theater? Is there a context where YouTube could be more than a viral joke? The content is already there, but when we view it, do we really see it?

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