The Spear Carrier:
Personal Histories of Performance
By Stephen Johnson
Introduction
I am in the midst of a project, for which I am asking others to remember their first experiences of performance, whether as performers themselves, as students of performance, or as audience members. For the most part, I am talking with people who have maintained a close relationship with the performing arts as adults--students, teachers, curators and archivists, performers, but most important, people who remain passionate about performance.
The Goal
My goal is to understand the origins of this passion--how these people were introduced to performance, what impressed them first and most, how the passion developed, and how it may or may not have changed their lives. I am interested in this question for personal reasons: I have felt this passion, and it most certainly has changed my life.
The Stakes
I have always been interested in this question, yes; but now, just after a pandemic that prevented us from gathering for live performance--and from any gatherings at all--I believe it is useful to remember just how important such experiences can be. Perhaps performance has made a comeback in your own corner of cultural practice--I can only hope. In any case, it's important to remember that people and cultures throughout history and around the world have experienced the suppression of cultural expression of any kind, including performance--and continue to experience that suppresion as I write. It's useful to remember just how important it is to be able to experience performance, as a gathering of people--and how accidental.
It will be clear from the scope of the Gatherings Project that its definition of performance covers a broad range of experience. I hope that by giving these more personal microhistories I can reinforce just how pervasive, and how essential I believe it is.
Myself Among Others
I am interviewing others concerning their first memories of performance. I don't think I should ask others to do what I am not willing to do myself. These entries are my attempt to supplement what others have given so generously. Yes, I am writing, while others are speaking, and there is most certainly a difference between these two ways of remembering. I suppose I might have recorded my memories, or asked someone else to interview me. In all honesty, I am writing because I love to write 'the journal,' and have kept one for most of my life. But I also want to provide an alternative to the interview in the pursuit of these memories, because I know that the interview--the oral history--is profoundly uncomfortable for some. Fair enough. Here is another way to remember.
A Context for these memories
I provide a list of questions and intended conversations to anyone I am talking with about their first memories, a list that can be found at this link. Since I am writing down a number of memories, it makes some sense to provide the answers to those first invitations here.
I grew up in southern Ontario, of settler stock on both sides. I am what is commonly known as a WASP. My father's family were early 20th century economic immigrants from Bristol, England, and my mother's were farm-and-small-business immigrants who re-settled from New York State to Ontario in the early 19th century. I grew up on a sheep farm, surrounded by a farming community that still had some memory of settling and clearing the land; we were new family, the outsiders with city jobs and churches, who were not natural to the farming life--though I think we gave it a good shot, and could take pride in our love of the land. I personally was born and raised on this farm, and knew nothing else. I was both from and not from 'Lowville.'
I was exposed to performance from the age of six weeks, as the family story goes, because that new invention, the television, was permanently installed in the house and switched on, and I was propped up in front of it as a new-age babysitter. As for live performance--I attended from the age of about four, though not often. It was not a part of the normal course of events in my family. My father was an 'inner city' 'street kid' who couldn't afford to attend any kind of performance when he was growing up. My mother was raised in a strict protestant faith that looked on all public gathering as against propriety. Even the church services we attended were undemonstrative--the existence of an organ raised great concerns for the congregation.
It remains unclear to me why I was introduced to any performance at all, when it seems to me that it was both economically and ethically suspect in my family's culture. And yet there I was, over and over again, attending to performance. It may have been organized at some expense of time and trouble by my parents. It may have been 'accidentally' sitting in the corner of the basement. It may have been improvised before, during, and after the hours of a public education, over which my family had little control. And it may have been an act of rebellion. As you read on, if you read on, you will find all of that here.
Performance Pervasive in the Autobiography
I do not know if my own experience of performance during my life is like or unlike the experience of others. Only in the writing, the reading, and the response of others will that judgement be made. I do know that performance, in all its forms, is 'extra ordinary' in my own understanding of my life's history. In my self-narrative:
There was a concerted effort by the cultures that surrounded me to prevent me from experiencing 'performance' of any kind.
Experiences of 'performance' stand out in my own self-narrative as 'memorable,' as if these were the structured events through which my life could be understood.
My own experience of 'performance,' in all its forms, seems to have informed my experience of the rest of my world, shaping those life-events before, during and after, as I planned, experienced, and then remembered.
As I review my own life, I seem to have experienced it, in the moment and in the memory, as if it had been on-stage. I do not imagine my life on a farm as a life on a farm. It was life on a stage that looked like a farm, and I am in the audience, looking on.
As I talk with others about their early exposure to and influence by performance, I begin to see that there may be nothing extraordinary about my experience. But then, all of our experiences of performance are extra-ordinary.
The Organization of the Entries
I intend to provide a three-part structure to these entries, more or less following the list of prompts provided to everyone I talk with as a part of this project.
The memory, as I can write it down 'right now.' I do this, knowing it will change 'the next time I write it down.' I will try to focus on exactly what I remember--by sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and not the narrative. Not to diminish the importance of narrative, but I would not want the needs of a good story to excise any extraneous, seemingly unimportant emotional or sense memory.
The context, as I struggle to understand these images as the adult I am now, knowing more about the cultural and personal histories that led toward, and followed from, the 'event.'
A tentative conclusion, asking what I can make of these memories, just now, as an historian of performance.
The emphasis here is on the tentative, the provisional reading of any memory, of any reading, of any interpretation. A memory is manufactured just at the moment we remember, and then re-manufactured, 're-membered' each time we 'think it again.' I appreciate that this is not everyone's understanding of memory. It is nevertheless what I experience as I re-member.
The Point of the Exercise is to attempt to understand both the power and the range of performance as it enters and affects our lives, and becomes inextricably wound around our own sense of who we are.
