Performance and Cultural Industries

Originally presented at the 12th Conference on European Culture, Barcelona, October 2013.

Governments and public institutions express cultural policy through language and initiatives reflecting the ideas, trends and arguments with which they wish to be associated.  However, this paper investigates the premise that core establishment principles are revealed in longer term patterns of resource allocation, which may diverge from political declarations of intent.

With specific reference to Great Britain, the paper examines the ethical bases of the relationship between art, the state and the public. Tracing the philosophical background to the foundation of the Arts Councils and the establishment of state patronage, it considers the social, cultural and aesthetic assumptions underpinning these developments. The continuing influence of older moral frameworks is explored through discrepancies between rhetoric and action in policy implementation.

It is suggested that the principles and purposes of art in public life must be reconsidered by artists and policy makers alike if coherent future policy directions are to be generated.

Originally presented at the Meaningless Meanings seminar, Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen (June 2013).  In political, social and cultural discourse, the term ‘community’ is wielded and appealed to as a central concept of democracy, conjuring a sense of common experience and mutual interest.  However, it frequently passes without critical scrutiny or inquiry into its essential value.  Its authority, meanwhile, is compromised by a capacity to serve purposes on alternate sides of any given debate.  It is an adaptable term, delineating social, geographical, religious, political, professional or even online groupings; in each case, however, it implies a consciousness of collective identity not necessarily experienced by members.

Community also carries a misleading implication of solidarity and singularity of outlook.  Any community must, by definition, be formed of individuals, but in many discussions the independence and diversity of individual viewpoints become subsumed in the homogeneity of community characterisation.  Presented as fundamentally integrated, harmonious and indivisible, community carries a positive moral charge into policy and academic literature.  In its many compound uses, from ‘community care’ to ‘community theatre’, it connotes local commitment and cohesion, opposing only discord and isolation.  With nothing substantive to push against, though, does the idea of ‘community’ provide any firmer basis for social action than a banal suggestion of ‘goodness’?

This paper proposes that the term ‘community’ can be better understood by exploring how and in whose interests it may be opposed, either directly or indirectly, in positive and possibly persuasive ways.  It argues that this approach offers a differentiated and more value-specific sense of what it is that is proposed or defended when community is invoked as a concept.  Revisiting an obsolete definition of the term which opposes ‘the commons’ to ‘the privileged classes’, it traces activist uses to fault lines in democratic representation which are more suggestive of difference than commonality, and explores tensions between community and the individual.

Forms of participatory practice have become ever more widely employed across the arts in recent years, operating across various institutional settings and social contexts. It is misleading, however, to assume that a single agenda binds these developments or that they serve the same social values and interests. Veils of common terminology can conceal important differences of political intent and ethical integrity. Conceptions of art, artists, culture and community vary widely, while terms such as participation, engagement and co-creation are rarely well defined. This article draws on current research into UK cultural and artistic leadership, as well as established theories of participation and action, to explore the complex power relations that underpin participatory discourse. It critiques policies and practices that claim ‘participation’ as an automatic methodological virtue, questioning the positive connotations of participatory language, particularly in relation to shaping assumptions of shared interest.  It argues that there is a need for improved critical self-awareness on the part of artists involved in participatory projects and processes, discussing possible frameworks for analysis of the relevant power relationships.

This paper provides an overview of the doctoral thesis 'The discourse of cultural leadership' undertaken at RGU from 2012-2016. Full text of the thesis including the original abstract is available on RGU's Open Air site: https://openair.rgu.ac.uk/handle/10059/1450

The thesis is currently shortlisted for the 3rd ENCATC Research Award on Cultural Policy and Cultural Management.

Cultural leadership became a key concept in cultural policy and training in the UK during the early 2000s. It attracted significant public and private investment and remains a major focus for development programmes, now internationally, despite significant changes in sectoral needs and context. This paper reviews the evolution of cultural leadership as a discursive construct, drawing on a decade’s research. It pays attention to key inclusions and exclusions, employing Arendt’s theory of action to critique fundamental assumptions. A tendency to privilege organisational leadership is challenged by considering the social and aesthetic dimensions of cultural practice alongside corresponding influences from other spheres of action which complicate
the notion of autonomy in cultural production. To define cultural leadership is therefore to engage with culture’s place in civil society. Distinctions between entrepreneurial, generous and public dimensions of cultural leadership are identified in the analysis with implications for practitioners, training providers and policy makers.

Various studies suggest that those who are ‘socially disadvantaged’ remain less likely to attend theatre. However, empirical research shows that pricing is only one ‘barrier’ to attendance; simultaneously, research into the experience of both theatregoers and non-theatregoers reveals an anxiety about theatregoing expressed through a preoccupation with dress, convention and other forms of ritual. However, much of this research does not distinguish on the basis of class and there is little evidence of how working class people experience theatergoing when they do attend.

The paper uses ‘thick description’ and ethnographic research conducted via focus groups to build on Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the relationship between ‘taste’ and class in order to examine mainstream theatre as a site for struggle. It uses the Royal Court Theatre, Liverpool, as a locus, due to the theatre’s success in attracting people from the most deprived wards of the UK.

The writer Emma Bennett first heard ‘ASMR’ (autonomous sensory meridian response) mentioned during interdisciplinary conversations about lullabies and the politics of work and rest while at Hubbub. After Googling the practice, Emma began watching Olivia’s Kissper ASMR to aid sleep and to indulge a long-held susceptibility to ‘tingles’. Here, Emma asks: Could this spectatorial practice aimed at attaining a dreamy, sleepy passivity be reframed as an active research practice? And, might this counterintuitive move raise productive theoretical questions about activity and passivity, questions that open on to the ethics of rest and its opposites?

Performing using amplified and non-amplified speech, projected images and three-dimensional interruptions to reflect on themes of work, resistance and an embarrassed longing for things soft. Composed along the axes of hard/soft and loud/quiet, What Matter asks what happens when, in the formal setting of a classical music concert, the offstage is brought onstage, and the inner voice shouted out loud.

Commissioned by Hubbub as part of its exploration of rest and its opposites, a research project hosted by the Hub at Wellcome Collection.

This article considers the operations of direct audience address in the stand-up comedy of Stewart Lee. By analyzing the grammatical and interpellative operations of Lee's address to various audiences, both ‘live’ and televisual, it considers the perverse kind of pleasure that arises from being addressed, and insulted, as though one were part of a collective entity of which one may or may not feel ‘part’. In particular, it identifies certain confusions inherent in the personal-pronoun ‘you’ when it is deployed by a performer onstage, or on camera. Via close analysis of excerpts from Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (2009) and 90s Comedian (2006), the author suggests that Lee's meticulous attention to grammar reveals the pronoun 'you' as the site of tensions between stand-up's supposed intimacy and directness, and the distance necessarily interposed by the formalities of the performance situation. This reading problematizes what many scholarly and anecdotal accounts of stand-up frame as its friendliness, its claims to intimacy or directness, its ability to make spectators feel as if the comedian is addressing them as part of a one-on-one conversation. Drawing on what Denise Riley has named ‘linguistic unease’, a feeling that emerges from the gulf between the embodied scene of speech and the formal necessity of linguistic convention, this article suggests that a one-on-one conversation is no guarantee of friendly intimacy. It suggests that Lee's stand-up mobilizes precisely this sort of linguistic unease in order to call attention to the formal, conventional nature of the stand-up address. In so doing, it troubles recourse to an easy collectivity, a notion of ‘the public’ that ignores its implication in commercialized structures of entertainment.

The following text is a dialogue between Johanna Linsley and Emma Bennett on the possibility of translating a performance on which they collaborated into text. The performance, a lecture titled The Present Becomes Us, is based on a science fiction premise: what if the Future is a geographical location which derives its materiality by stealing potentiality from the Present? The premise was created by Johanna, but the lecture was performed by Emma, using the subjunctive mood, and opening with the lines ‘This is a performance lecture by Johanna Linsley, or it would be if she were here’. The text explores questions about temporality, geography and the places where histories are made, so that a complex and embodied notion of the archive subtly emerges. The voices of the two writers(/performers) are not strictly delineated, so that in this dialogue as in the performance, a porous and ambiguous understanding of presence and identity remains.

In this chapter, I reflect on the silly irresistibility of comic repetition. I am interested in where this might happen to coincide with what we might think of as the more ‘serious’ qualities of academic study: attentiveness, meticulousness, rigour. If, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes, ‘obsession is the most durable form of intellectual capital’ (Sedgwick, 2003: 2), then the compulsive return to an object of study is the mode by which it operates. What we might call a ‘close reading’, in practice, is achieved via repeated acts of reading, returning again and again to the text. After Sedgwick, we might think of this kind of reading as driven by, and generative of, a certain emotional closeness, one that can be risky, as in ‘too close for comfort’. In this chapter, I am interested in how the repeated, compulsive re-reading of a text might begin to undo the reader’s ability to ‘see’ what is before her, at least in a clear or singular outline. And, I am interested in the way that, unexpectedly, Stewart Lee’s stand-up comedy offers occasions for reflecting upon the dangers – and pleasures – of reading closely and reading repeatedly.

Banned from public broadcast in Australia and completely reimagined for the silver screen, Cole Porter’s song ‘Too Darn Hot’ was revised and later recontextualised in order to address concerns about taste and sexually explicit content. As the opening number to the second act of Porter’s 1948 musical Kiss Me, Kate, the song exists “in context” as a curtain-raising production number and opportunity for a complex dance sequence. However, the double meaning of the lyrics – associating blistering heat with male impotence – has dominated the song’s reception.

In 1953, audiences were exposed to a new interpretation of the song. Adapted as a star vehicle for Ann Miller at the opening of MGM’s film adaptation of Kate, ‘Too Darn Hot’ becomes a manifesto for the overt sexuality of her character Lois. Thus, abandoning its significance as the second solo number for a person of colour in the show and shifting the perspective of the singer from an exhausted stagehand to an aspirational chorus girl, the song comes to represent a different sexualised perspective and another form of performance.

This paper will examine archival sources from the Cole Porter collections at the Library of Congress and the Irving S. Gilmore library at Yale University in order to shed light on Porter’s initial development of the song in mid-1948. It will then consider the revision of the song’s lyrics for public broadcast, the American touring company and London 1951 production in order to analyse its transformation in the 1953 MGM film.

Dr Albert Sirmay was a Hungarian born composer and music editor. From the early 1920s to the 1960s, he acted as publisher (through Chappell Music) for most of the leading Broadway composers of the day including Jerome Kern, Frederick Loewe, Richard Rodgers and Cole Porter. But whereas Sirmay’s input was mostly limited to arranging publication versions of songs for composers such as Frederick Loewe and Richard Rodgers, he also acted as a copyist for performance materials during the process of writing several of Porter’s shows, including music that was never published.

Letters between Porter and ‘Doc’ Sirmay shed light on both the transcription and editorial process and is supported by various music manuscripts in the Cole Porter papers at both Yale University and the Library of Congress. This paper will specifically look at examples from Mexican Hayride (1944), Seven Lively Arts (1944) and Kiss Me, Kate (1948) to consider the musical implications of this collaboration.

In addition to this, Porter and Sirmay’s correspondence also indicates a deeper personal relationship where Porter sought and Sirmay volunteered advice on professional matters. This paper will analyse examples of this through the 1940s and 1950s in order to characterise a possibly unique working relationship between composer and his publisher, copyist, and confidante.

Although the different members of the creative team of a musical are oftenperceived as being responsible for distinct roles, in truth the process is more collaborative. Most accounts of the genesis of Kiss Me, Kate imply that the creative forces behind it worked largely without reference to one another, before combining their efforts during the rehearsal period in late 1948. However, examples like the title quotation from choreographer Hanya Holm - "How did he get in there?" she wrote on a draft script, where a previously-offstage character suddenly delivers a line in the middle of a scene - indicate that the creative team paid attention to all aspects of the show.

In this presentation, I will refer to primary sources that exemplify the different levels of collaboration that occurred during the creation of Kiss Me, Kate. In particular, I will focus on examples where members of the creative team made contributions to aspects of the show outside their credited area. These include an annotated script and notebook from the New York Public Library belonging to Holm, in which she makes suggestions about the dialogue and action, and annotated scores from Alfred Drake's papers at the Library of Congress that illustrate changes made to his songs at his insistence.

Overall, I seek to examine how the collaborative nature of the show works against the grain of an "integrated" reading of the piece, while at the same time demonstrating how the team searched for flow between the score and other elements.

This chapter evaluates the cultural value of the MGM Wizard of Oz as an artefact of queer culture. Using insights from personal discourses and queer theory, it appraises how The Wizard of Oz facilitates individual assimilation and celebrates non-normative identities for generations of audiences.