Spear Carrier: Attending to Performance
A personal interrogation of early performances, appended to First Gatherings
By Stephen Johnson
Introduction to this blog-like whatever-it-is:
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. I want to understand the origins of this passion--how they were introduced to performance, what impressed them first and most, how this passion developed, and how it may or may not have changed their lives. I have always been interested in this question for personal reasons. I remember.
Performance Pervasive: I have always been interested in this question, yes; but just now, when live performance has for some time been taken away from us, I believe it is useful to remember just how important this experience can be, over the long term. I'm certain that anyone reading this believes that live performance will make a comeback. And that is what I believe; but people and cultures throughout history, around the world, and in their own personal lives, have experienced the suppression of cultural expression, including performance culture. I believe it's useful to remember just how important such experiences can be--and how accidental. It will be clear from the descriptions and examples of performance in the Gatherings Project that the definition of performance I ascribe to covers a lot of ground. I hope that by giving these more personal microhistories I can provide some sense of 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 the memories that 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 re/membering. 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.
Context for these memories: I provide a list of questions and intended conversations to anyone I am talking with about these first memories, a list that can be found at this link [ https://gatheringspartnership.com/prompts-for-first-gatherings-conversations ]. 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 in the early 19th century. I grew up on a farm, and attended the theatre from the age of about four--not often, and not as a normal course of events in my family's cultural practice. On the contrary, it remains unclear to me why I was taken 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.
There is nothing extraordinary about my experiences, unless the surprise at the existence of performance at all in my life, and the surprise at its effect on me throughout my life, is extraordinary. But then, all of our experiences of performance are extra-ordinary, as I find every time I talk with others. I invite you to take a look at the interviews we have already done. You'll see.
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.
1. The memory, as I can write it down 'right now'--knowing it will change 'the next time I write it down.' Just as I say to everyone else, I want to focus on exactly what I remember--by sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and not the narrative. Not at first.
2. 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.'
3. A tentative conclusion, asking what I can make of these memories, just now.
Of course I will fail at this three-part structure, just as all interviews finally stray from the questions provided. It's both good to have some structure to begin--and useful to stray. Or so I believe. 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: To attempt to understand both the power and the range of performance as it enters and affects our lifes, and becomes inextricably wound around our own sense of who we are.
Be well.