Miguel Hernández

The kind of musical effects the Joan Manuel Serrat uses to sing the poetry of Miguel Hernández, his voice and intonation, make me physically ill. The idea of singing this beautiful, delicate poetry as a kind of flashy pop music is a sacrilege. It probably does not matter what I think, though. In other words, my opinion has no sway over anyone else, or no claim. I know I am right, of course, but I have no argument that goes beyond my personal reaction. My only way of demonstrating my point would be to point to my own reaction: "this is how this makes Jonathan feel, can't you see that!"

But if you don't feel that, all that means is that are not Jonathan. I have no problem with Leonard Cohen's "Take This Waltz," based on a Lorca poem, or with Enrique Morente's translation into Spanish of Cohen's music for this song. Singing Spanish poetry to various kinds of music does not bother me in general, just in the specific instance.

Here is my third post on this subject. Here the idea is to give a list of things I don't know, in the form of questions.

What are the major unresolved problems of performance theory, its shortcomings, its theoretical "gaps"? What are its controversies? Does it have rival schools or does it share a single central paradigm? Is performance theory a set of analytical tools for looking at performances, or a true "theory"? How does its ideological presuppositions determine its strengths and limitations? How does the choice of object studied determine the shape of the "theory" itself, in other words, does it make a difference whether drama, poetry, or dance becomes the paradigmatic object? How does its historical development influence its present state?

How could it be fruitfully compared to other theoretical subfields, like film theory, narratology, the theory of translation?

Where is it headed? What is the future project of performance theory?

Here's the second post on performance theory. My first step was to describe what I already know in terms of already existing performance theory. The idea of the second post ito go beyond the most obvious level, without necessarily being totally original. This is not what I and everyone else already know about it, but a list of topics I think I'd like to explore. It turns out I've already done more thinking in this area that I thought I had done. Forcing myself to make a list turned out to be a good way of eliciting from myself those particular reflections:


(1) Performativeness (degrees of). Here the idea is that less performative performances are equally performative. In other words, performances that de-emphasize "drama," that are drier and more oriented toward a reproduction of what's on the page, are equally worthy of attention. By the same token, very stylized performances are not necessarily more performative than ones that strive for "realism." This whole question has to be rethought.

(2) Pedagogy. Elocution, in my Grandmother's generation, was the way literature was taught. She could give dramatic readings of texts she had memorized well into her 90s. Performance implies a new pedagogy, in which students themselves should be performers. But, as Steve Evans points out in his interview with ??? [Al Filreis], performance is still kind of an afterthought. The poem on the page still reigns supreme, and we need to find a way of making more than a mere supplement.

(3) Improvisation. Not all performance is improvisation, but improvisation is always a performance. All performance does involve an element of "liveness," of attentiveness to the present. Improvisation brings that attentitiveness to the forefront. It might also be interesting to look at performance in terms of preparation, of logistics.

(4) Duende. The duende is in the first instance a theory of performance, not of artistic creation or inspiration. What interests me here is the way in which a theory of performance can be paradigmatic, primary rather than secondary, in poetics. I also want to explore the slippage between performance and creation in Lorca's theory of the duende.

(5) Song setting. What is fascinating here is the way in which a poem might be derived from a melody or a melody from a text. A kind of translation?

(6) Vocal stylings. Certain singers put across the words in an ideal way, not by overdramatizing, but by using melody, voice, and phrasing to get at the best possible oral interpretation of that particular lyric. On the other hand, there are performance practices that sacrifice the words to vocal techniques. Vowels must be sung a certain way in the interest of sonority, to the detriment of the text. There is fertile ground for theorization here.

(7) Prosody. Usually, once performance happens, prosody is forgotten--paradoxically. That is, there is a kind of false opposition between the prosody on the page and the prosody in the voice. The object of phonology is a written sentence. This needs to be rethought. People wanting to do this field seriously should learn a little more linguistics.

(8) Voice. I'd like to look at the human voice itself as the basis of everthing else. If you had a theory of the voice you would have a theory of the performance of any linguistic performance.

(9) Timbre. I've written a paper on the theory of timbre, that you can probably still see at the Hall Center for the Humanities Website. (Many of these points are overlapping rather than discretely separated.)

(10) Rhythm. Performances happen in time; they are rhythmically organized in some fashion. Actors might wait a "beat" before proceeding. A theory of performance would need a good account of rhythm. My study of percussion over the past 10 years or so has taught me a lot, though I am not at all a good drummer.

I'm slated to teach a graduate seminar on poetry and performance in the fall of 09, with another colleague in my department, Jill Kuhnheim, a specialist in Latin American poetry who shares my interest in performance. I thought I would figure out what I need to learn about the theory of performance before I could teach it. So I made a list of 10 things that I think I know about this subject. A follow up will be 10 idea that are more or less original to me, or that aren't obvious things everyone alraedy ought to already know about the subject.

My first thought was that I knew nothing at all about the subject, but that's not quite the case. This is not everything I know, but the listing of 10 major points seems like a convenient starting point. Here goes:

1) Theory of theater. One place from which performance theory emerged is from work in drama and theater. The basic idea is that the literary study of the theatrical text on the page is not sufficient without a look at the impliciations of how theater is performed and the concrete circumstances that surround performance. In Aristotelian terms, this is spectacle, one of six major elements (and a bit of melos too).

2) Semiotics.. Barthes's essays on Brecht, for example, point to a semiotics of theater. The idea is that elements of spectacle are signs in the same way that words are. Theater can be studied as a total signifying system in which language is only one element. Dramatists who de-emphasize verbal signifying in favor of other performative elements lead to this study (Artaud).

3) Anthropology. But Performance is not just theater. From an anthropological perspective, theater is but one kind of performance. Game, rituals, and the performance of "roles" in everyday life are also part of a larger category. Artaud's exposure to other forms of theater in Bali was influential in his ideas. The anthropological perspective entails a less ethnocentric view of things.

4) Ethnopoetics. Rothenberg's Ethnopoetics is based squarely on performance practices, taking an anthropological perspective.

5) Poetics Beyond Ethnopoetics. The contributors to Bernstein's Close Listening bring performance studies into the orbit of Language Poetry, with a critique of conventional poetry readings and an exploration of many issues involved in the oral performance of poetry, also from a less theatrico-centric perspective.

6) Orality. Walter Ong's distinction between orality and literacy is a significant backdrop to performance theory. Not all performances imply an opposition to literacy, but all are in some sense "oral," in that they involve spoken language (if they have language at all). Previous work on Serbian oral epic lays behind some of this thinking.

7) Cultural Studies. Performance theory fits the agenda of Cultural Studies, in its emphasis on popular culture, the performance of social roles in subcultures, etc...

8) Performativity. Theory of performance might bring into play Chomsky's competence / performance distinction, or Judith Butler's sense that social roles are performed, or the performativity of speech act theory. In short, there is a kind of fruitful punning on the word performance itself.

9) Audience. A theory of performance is a theory of the audience, usually involving the physical presence of a public and some notion of reception. It's true that the "reader" is often invoked in discussions of literature, but in discussions of performance the spectator is more alive and concrete, not a reader merely posited as a theoretical construct.

10) Body. With performance, the body of the performer comes into play. Not the merely theoretical body involved in writing from / with the body.




What will be fun is to see what I know after teaching the course.