Layers of performance and the performative
“To force musicians to play beautifully or ‘with the soul’ is actually a demand ‘to give their soul’ – testifying to the intensity and intimacy of the musician-patron relationship” (1). It’s clear to me that people have a tenuous grasp on what is a service/performance/skill, and what is a person. We do it constantly: workers’ bodies are expected to be the property of those who pay for their work. This only gets more entrenched and complicated by the premises of affective labor, by the muddling effect of sex (sex workers being typically thought of as “selling their bodies” and, by extension, themselves), by the parasocial relationship that grows out of connecting to someone’s art and, of course, by the extra layers of gender and race.
Performance still, video by Alexander Sargent, September 2022
I feel much of this as a singer, and specifically a female one. There’s an expectation that what I’m put on the earth to do is to please, to entertain. It means I come prepared and open to composers’ and directors’ visions on stage. But also that part of my job is often to charm donors and audience members, sometimes overtly as part of my contract in the form of benefits or meet and greets. It means I’m conditioned to take criticism or praise on not just my specific performance or interpretation, but also a whole slew of increasingly personal layers: my technique (sure, this is a practice, after all), my voice (how much of this is innate, how much trained?), my face shape, my body, my personality, my clothes… Some of this is collaboration, some of it coercion. I was trained to be largely thankful for or at least unbothered by any type of comment at all. The boundary between my work and who I am is nebulous.
My instrument is the most common, understandable and easy to connect to for most people. It’s a formidable vector of emotion and propaganda. It’s visceral and human, but also mysterious in its highly specialized capacities. Almost anyone can sing. They can’t necessarily do it the way I do, however. It’s not just my hours of work at the piano that they’re relating to, it’s me, or some version of me as they understand it. I don’t just carry my instrument with me wherever I go, in fact, I am my instrument, which means that I can be expected to perform at any time. Which means I never stop performing.
But of course, this isn’t so special to me as a singer. It’s perhaps more overt – “sing us an aria” at a party when I’d rather just drink champagne and eat cheese – but it’s fundamentally no different than the expectation to always be receptive to others’ needs and desires that most people who were raised as women or who look like women are faced with. To be seen as a woman is to be conscious of being perceived, and to perform a role for that perception.
Because of this, performing as a female musician also draws on and becomes enmeshed with the performance of femininity and the tools or techniques refined in that role. Expectations and perceptions of female performers are often predicated upon gender-based moralistic and labor ideals. But female also entertainers often make use of performance – and crucially, affective – practices specific to their gender. The roles of “performer,” “female” and “female performer” can’t be easily distinguished, as each facet informs the others, not just in how entertainers are received, but in the very practice of our music making, our own assumptions about audience interface, reception and what we might owe the public.
I’m keenly aware that I do want to please an audience. I didn’t become a performing artist because I hate attention (and I don’t have a Substack and YouTube and Instagram just out some sense of obligation to have that oh-so-important “online presence.”) I want to be seen and loved. I do want people to feel some sort of ownership over me, in the way that loyalty, support, appreciation, recognition, representation, possession, etc… all get muddled up in a series of potentially toxic threads of contact. It’s not just a fact of my profession, swallowed with bitterness and resignation. I want to give up a part of myself to you to borrow and to keep. But there’s the rub: I want to give it. When I offer you myself, we enter into a communion; if not, I’m being sapped.
Still, this lovely little duality doesn’t offer such a neat solution. Setting aside that none of us is particularly perfect at recognizing others’ boundaries even with the best of intentions to do so, and that most people feel no need to think beyond what they think they’re “owed” by service workers or performers, most of us don’t actually have a clear vision of what makes us comfortable. When is my discomfort fear of the unknown, fear of pushing myself, fear of getting out of my own way? When is it a fundamental response to being asked to do too much? When have I actually chosen to offer myself to others, and when have I simply been conditioned to think that I want a specific kind of attention? When do I get to trust myself to make the call?
The answers come from a safe and supportive space to mature and explore, but even then, those answers will never be fixed nor completely free from multiple valences of social expectations. As in sex, consent in performance is ever-evolving.
In her brief “Uses of the Erotic,” Audre Lorde writes: “The erotic cannot be felt secondhand” (2). I suspect this is the reason we flatten others into symbols and icons for consumption. We want to feel their force and charisma, so we steal it from them if it can’t be shared organically. But in so doing, we strip eroticism of its authentic power and turn it into an exploitation. I’m reminded of that video of a raccoon trying to eat cotton candy by doing what raccoons typically do, washing it in water first (3). Of course, the cotton candy dissolves, and we feel much empathy for the poor, hapless mammal. This is all very sad for the racoon, sure, but in this metaphor affective laborers – especially those female-presenting, and especially women of color – are the cotton candy.
Notes:
Hofman, Ana. 2015. “Music (as) Labour: Professional Musicianship, Affective Labour and Gender in Socialist Yugoslavia.” Ethnomusicology Forum 24(1): 28-50.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as a Source of Power.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 53-59.
In French, the raccoon is a raton laveur, or “washer rat.”
I seldom feel any particular urge to share the texts I regularly write as part of my coursework with a broader audience (just how many article responses and musical analyses are you desperate to read, after all?), but the one above is made up portions of a recent write-up which I allowed to be more personal.