„A word is dead

When it is said,

Some say.

I say it just

Begins to live

That day“

by Emily Dickinson 

The singing Performer  - as an experience of self through repeated behavior

When I first started out being on stage, I had to write down single sentences that I learned by heart like a script to be able to say something in-between songs. I needed to, I needed something to hold on to. And the more I got comfortable on stage the more I started talking, the more I started to perform talking in the open space between songs. Sometimes I even took too much space, maybe too much space away from the music by performing something else – my self(s)?

If we perform more than our music, our chosen body of work and communicate with, through, in – and outside of the music, what do we perform when being (on stage)?

Let us retrace some steps in the concept of the performative:

So much ink has been spilled about performativity and performance. We are enwrapped in performing, in showing doing, in giving meaning to our speaking. We are used to use our bodies as tools to show our doing. 

The concept of the performative can be traced back to the 1960s and  J.L. Austin’s book How to do things with words, in which Austin claims that words actually do things. He establishes that language does more than declaring or conveying information, it also brings state of affairs into being. “I now pronounce you married”, “I declare the games open” or  “I promise you that…” are sentences that actually do things and perform actions. It opened up a new way of thinking about all language and with it brought a broader view of what constitutes language. “Perhaps language is best thought of as a performative in general. Even when we seem to be conveying information, we are doing things and bringing about states of affairs.”* 

This idea joined forces with ideas and theories by, for example, Irving Goffman, who talks about how we are always structuring our lives as performances, then John Searle and French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who took these notions further by saying that we are always performing a text. He understands writing not as a sign dependent on the human will to represent, but as a trace left behind, which within a system of references (such as language) ad infinitum further refers to positions within this system.*

Richard Schechner emphasizes that language is a derivative from bodies. Not the other way around. As I understand it to him language and speech is a specialized kind of embodied behavior. “Embodied behavior is primary.”* With that he roots performativity in experience and embodied behavior. To him performances of any kind of like art, rituals, or ordinary life are “restored bits of behaviors”, "twice behaved behaviors,“ in other words – repeated behaviors that we learned, trained for, rehearsed etc. He supposes that there is no real first time. Every behavior we do is made up of other behaviors that we then re-arrange, re-emphasize and re-ensemble. Restoration of behavior is never for the first time. And this brings me back to my first chapter “Between the signs”, in which I argue that every interpretation starts with its repetition, with being repeated. I would also say that through the concept of restored bits of behavior, so does every performance. It starts and generates out of repetition. Think of the gesture of taking a bow and how it has been repeated over decades, this is a very obvious example, but every movement we do on and off stage derived from imitated and repeated patterns, behavior we learned and repeated. “to be anything at all is to be nothing more than a pattern, rhythm or refrain of responses…to be a self or body is to perform some type of recognizable norm, and yet in that very repetition norms can be destabilized and transformed to new forms of recognition.”*  

Interpretation and Performance are both connected through their core of repetition. 

Derrida laid the path further into the exploration of the term performativity by leading to a new understanding of the term event as a journey through context. He begins with the notion of “iterability” (I mentioned the term in Between the signs - iterability entails repetition and alteration at the same time). What I find enormously interesting that he argues that a word will only have force if it is repeatable or iterable and even further that meaning is generated by repeatability. To explain this I will use an example from the book Integrative Performance by Experience Bryon: If we get jabbed by a pin, we don’t say “yum” but “ouch”. We all know what “ouch” means because it has been repeated in countless instances. And because a word can function in countless instances, it functions as a word – because more than one speaker recognizes the same function and through it attaches meaning.

Meaning is possible through shared and repeatable conventions. According to Derrida the fact that we have to appeal to a context, shows that no text inhabits a meaning in itself and that texts are for that reason open to re-interpretation as well as re-contextualization. While at the same time every repetition in itself remains unique due to the everchanging context of past and present. Each movement, each word, each step, each gesture even though repeated is also always a singular event. 

In my case for example, the role as a singer standing in front of an audience is a role that has been there for centuries, it has been repeated in all forms and situations, in church, court, concert halls - in a religious setting, in a secular setting , in a theatrical setting, in a social setting. In other words everything I do, I've already done and has already been done – in life, on stage, off stage, in the practice rooms, the way we play our instruments, the way we sing –are repeated bits of behaviors that shape and built our performances on and off stage. 

Another example explained by Bryon is, if we imagine singing a scale we can either shift our focus to "the things that I’m doing" as in taking a breath, executing, pitching, or we can shift our focus to “the experience of doing these things”. To shift the focus towards the experience of the doing will open up the middle field of performing in relation to the way of doing.“Returning to the idea of “attending to our experience” within the performing disciplines, we might begin to ask not what we do, but what our way of doing might be, the doing of our doing, the practice of our practice”* 

TRY THIS:

(This example* is taken from Bryon’s book Integrative Performance)

 A Performer = who is doing

B Performing = way of doing

C Performance = what is done

As you are reading this page there is you , the performer (A) doing the performance of reading (C). You are reading, (A to C) - but wait, what's happening in (B)? Are you skimming the pages to get the basic idea? Are you searching for things that apply to you? Are you connecting the ideas on this page to your own knowledge base? Are you trying to make sense of the ideas? Are you criticizing the text as it unfolds? What do you bring to the act of reading as far attitude? Are you suspicious, eager, despassionate, interested?

In that exercise, what was the "doing" of your reading? What was your way of reading? This is the stuff of performing (B). You (A) are not simply reading (C) but rather you are performing (B) reading.

Through asking what is the doing of our doing opens the field and lets us explore how we practice our disciplines as a whole, on and off stage, how we lay the values, the categories, the opinions upon our works.

To explore my question, Who am I on stage?, I’m now asking, What is my “way of doing” on stage? What are my patterns, my repeated behaviors that I learned and either consciously or unconsciously repeat, re-arrange, re-emphasize. What is my way of doing of performing pieces of music and the moments between them?

Take me to the next chapter – Performing Talking