Re: [-empyre-] poetics...

[Kenneth Newby <knewby@sfu.ca>]

Sally,

Yes, the situation in which the same story is told and retold again and 
again, with variations, seems to be a key component of the example.  
The source narrative is not unlike a huge database of narrative 
elements, with indigenous elements woven in to give cultural grounding 
(the punakawan, old friends, or "clowns" and further localized on the 
micro-level of the specific conditions of a particular performance.  
That's an interesting feature of cultures of oral-emphasis like this.  
One learns by imitation and absorption of what was done before while at 
the same time adding new details and innovations that reflect the here 
and now of place.

Performance provides the advantage of an open invitation to 
reinterpretation.  Works of cinema tend to become authoritative due to 
the immense concentration of resources poured into their production, 
with remakes few and prohibitively expensive.  Performance requires the 
remount if any work is to persist and represents a powerful river of 
innovation.

Another nuance here might be the distinction that Schechner makes, in 
his articulation of a poetics of performance, between social drama and 
aesthetic drama.  Social dramas are more variable, open and inclusive 
of their participants while aesthetic dramas are marked by the 
separation of the audience from the act of performance.  Social dramas, 
in the form of rituals of many kinds, tend to be focussed on 
transformations of the participants.  The Wayang also partakes of 
elements of the social drama in its ritual contextualization.

Our work, Leaf, which Aleksandra and myself made a couple of years ago 
might be worth describing in this context.  Leaf was an interactive 
public artwork that was placed in a neighborhood in Vancouver that is 
somewhat of a singularity.  To quote the Downtown Eastside Community 
Website: "It's been described as the poorest postal code in Canada, and 
its problems with crime, homelessness, and substance misuse have been 
topics of national discussion. But the Downtown Eastside is also a 
community rich in history, architecture, and diversity."  One of the 
most troubling events in the recent history of this neighborhood is 
that over the past 10 - 15 years dozens of women have disappeared  from 
this neighborhood.

http://www.missingpeople.net/vancouver_missing_women.htm

We were offered an opportunity to present our work in a gallery in the 
center of this neighborhood.  It immediately became clear that it would 
inappropriate, or perhaps irrelevant is a more appropriate word, to 
present any kind of work that did not directly engage with the 
community that hosts this gallery.  We were told that the community is 
typically skeptical of many presentations at this gallery finding 
little that spoke to their personal concerns.  As a consequence they 
rarely if ever entered the gallery itself.  Our response was to project 
video on the large floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the streetfront 
of the gallery.  One of these images was a physical model of autumn 
leaves continuously falling, swirling, gently to the ground from the 
top of the window frame to the ground at sidewalk level.  We focussed a 
camera at the sidewalk directly in front of the window/screen and 
watched for passersby.  When someone would walk by the leaves would 
spiral up in a virtual wind which also included names drawn from the 
appallingly large list of missing women.  Given that the persons 
walking by the window were so close they would often be unaware of the 
wind generated in their wake.  Only those who paused to look realized 
what was happening.  Across the street is a small "park", a triangular 
slab of asphalt with a couple of trees and a series of benches for 
sitting, several of which faced the gallery windows.  Most of the day 
and night these seats are occupied and they became points from which to 
watch and comment on what was going on of the sidewalk across the 
street.  The response from this aspect of the exhibition alone made it 
clear that the dynamic quality and clear relevance to the personal 
histories of the community achieved by the work were of value to this 
community.  Local street people would gather in front of the window and 
point out the names of friends and lovers as they appeared in the 
"wind".  It made "sense" for that community.  It would not have made 
sense in nearly the same way in any other community due to how situated 
it was in the local history, in spite of the fact that everyone in the 
city (and well beyond) knows the story, it being so widely reported in 
the texts of media reportage.

Thanks for you insightful comments Sally,

Kenneth.





On 8-Jan-06, at 3:34 AM, Sally Jane Norman wrote:

>  I'd like to know Aleksandra how much importance you  attribute to the 
> Ramayana and Mahabarata epics as narrative threads sufficiently 
> commonly understood to allow for the high level of "localised" 
> adaptation, reappropriation, improvisation that you mention - and also 
> as eminently literary threads from Sanskrit which work/ed their way 
> into  Balinese theatre.
>
> Many experts consider that while wayang theatre forms long predated 
> Hindu influences, and while latter Javanese creations drawing on the 
> Hindu epics are very clearly localised, at the same time there are 
> forms of sanskrit used amongst dalangs that refer to literary links 
> not to be overlooked - without trying to undermine multidisciplinary 
> "braiding" we're talking about, but without eclipsing ostensibly 
> literary strands for fear of their dominance.