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‘Moving Performers, Travelling Performance’ Roundtable Discussion 28th January
2010. Panellists: Robert Hampson, Liz Schafter, Henry Stobart. Moderator: Philip
Crang
Panellists:
Each panellist gave a brief introduction to their work:
1) Henry Stobart discussed his career as a performer who studied early music and then
became interested in other musics from around the world. His travels took him to Bolivia
where he went to fiestas, collected instruments, and made recordings of musical
performances with a view to performing the music himself. After learning an indigenous
language, he focussed on how music fitted into indigenous communities. His second area
of interest revolves around music that travelled from Europe and the impact of this
movement on indigenous music communities and musical technologies. In turn this
emphasised his concern with the relationship between creativity and place, looking at
how melodies became linked to particular places at particular times of the year. His final
and more recent interest is in digital indigeneity, in music videos and cultural politics,
examining what happens to the relationship between music and place when indigenous
entrepreneurs make music videos of very locally specific musics and mass distribute
them. For him the idea of circulation becomes key when looking at piracy and how new
technologies are shifting the landscape of the music industry.
2) Liz Schafer described how growing up in Birmingham near the RSC gave her great
accessibility to, and consciousness of, Shakespeare. For part of her career she moved to
Australia and whilst living there she became aware of the differences in Shakespearean
production compared to the UK, growing interested in the Australian appropriatization
and localization of Shakespeare, and the possibility of it circulating back to the centre of
Empire – Stratford Upon Avon. No Australian Shakespearean production has ever been
mounted at Stratford but she has recently written about a particular production of The
Comedy of Errors by the Bell Company in Australia, which is the only Australian
production of Shakespeare to have come to the UK. This production was interesting to
her in relation to the Shakespeare ‘brand’ as only the English are generally perceived to
be able to do, or own, Shakespeare. However the Bell Company marketed its production
as ‘distinctively Australian,’ and its reception in the UK raises questions regarding the
ability for Australians to own and reproduce Shakespeare. More generally she is
interested in what Australian theatre comes to the UK – Aboriginal theatre is viewed as
different and exotic, but mainstream Australian theatre transfers much less successfully,
apart from the recent play Speaking in Tongues. Her interests thus focus on brands of
Australianness as well as brands of Shakespeare. Her recent journal SI on ‘Unsettling
Shakespeare’ examines Shakespeare in settler communities, particularly Australia and
New Zealand, and looks at the idea of ‘exotic Englishness’ – at how Englishness is
rendered in an explicitly stereotypical fashion by postcolonial societies.
3) Robert Hampson discussed his academic interests in Conrad’s travels and writings in
Malaysia and his own work as a poet. He finds in these events that he has to negotiate
both these roles and identities, so he read one of his poems to express these tensions. He
was interested in issues of performance on the page by the writer, performance on the
page by the reader and then the performance of the poem to an audience. He has always
had an awareness of the audience and their role in his practice since he started doing
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readings in the 1960s. He asked: Why should we read poems? What do they offer
readers? He responded by reading one of his poems. He explores travel by air and car in
his poetry and as an academic his interests lie partly in travel and travel writing,
specifically the encounters with other cultures, both in terms of long distance travel, but
also as an everyday experience and negotiation. A lot of his work has focused on
encounters with North American culture partly because he has family in the US, partly
because North American popular culture is hegemonic, and partly because the poetic
tradition in which he writes has been in dialogue with North American poetry traditions.
So there is an internal negotiation of multiple identities in his poems and in his creation
of them. He read another poem to express this. Travel also features in his practice
because it provides an opportunity, the time and space, to write. He discussed how he
created his series of poems called ‘The War Against Tourism’ which were based on the
safety instructions given out at the start of flights, where he filtered out lines and
expressions, creating poems from them in dialogue with his ideas, with work he was
reading, and other things he had written on the page.
Panel Discussion
Each panellist then discussed how issues of circulation were important to their work.
Henry discussed the circulation of pirated music in relation to borders as 95% of music in
Bolivia is pirated, but around 70% of the copying occurs in Peru. Even though the music
is produced in Bolivia, people send recordings to Peru for it to be copied and then sent
back. The irony is that the equipment for copying is shipped into Chile, through Bolivia,
and across into Peru. So Peru dominates, and he is interested in why – part of the answer
is economic as Peru has had a stronger economy for a longer time so there are more
people with money to invest in equipment. Although the cost of copying equipment has
dramatically decreased in recent years Peru still dominates the market for pirated music.
Another factor is that Bolivians have a relatively low national self-esteem about the
quality of their products, which means that they would rather pay more for products from
Peru or Argentina, than to buy something labelled as Bolivian. National imaginaries are
therefore an important dynamic that shape the circulation of music. Liz drew parallels
with this situation, describing how national imaginaries can prevent the circulation of
some cultural products, as low national self esteem means that Australian Shakespeare is
never seen as good enough by Australians to be exported to the UK. The Bell production
that toured Australia then came to Bath and Blackpool, not London, highlighting that
national confidence can also impact on the circulation of products to particular locations
over others.
Issues of friendship and informal movement also shape the direction of circulation. In
wealthy areas of Bolivia, you cannot find original discs, they are all pirated, but in the
poorer market areas you can buy regional cds or vcds that are not available in the main
city centre. In the outlying market areas the vendors often know the artists personally,
building up an intimacy that impacts on how different things circulate and whether or not
trade is illicit. Piracy is driven by having access things that you would not have access to
otherwise, so pirated art house movies are often only available in the city centre through
informal networks and access to particular technologies. The relationship between when
things move, when they don’t, and how this relates to il/leaglity and informality was
therefore complex and multifaceted. In relation to issues of piracy, Robert discussed how
the term ‘piracy’ was viewed as a non-European form of trade, and for the Dutch in
particular, English sailors were also linked to piracy because they were not part of a
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Dutch monopoly, thus complicating the associations made between piracy and types of
trade.
Henry also discussed the circulation of music and how it was linked to seasonal ritual
practices in the Andes, with different genres of music being associated with different
places, allowing him to explore the relationship between music, ecology, and landscape.
At a particular time of year related to the agricultural cycle people would also engage
with traditions of music that were from other villages further away, highlighting the
different relationship between space, location and movement. Music was seen as more
potent when it came from other, distant places such that musical and ‘growing’ power
came from outside a particular individual location.
In considering the circulation of cultural products, Liz highlighted that it is hard for
contexts to circulate, even though performances or products might. Signs are read
differently according to their context, particularly regarding the signification of
Aboriginality or indigeneity. The most stunning Shakespeare productions she has seen
have been grounded in land rites so a production of As You Like It became powerfully
political because Rosalind and her father were Aboriginal. Aboriginal performers are
known about in Australia and their Aboriginality is discussed, but when transferring the
production to the UK, it is more difficult to signify Aboriginality in the same way to
bring those meanings to the play. The assumptions surrounding signification in theatre
and film are problematic but they become more so when productions travel overseas. The
context has to be remade because it is hard for its original form to be mobilised and some
meanings travel more easily than others (Jacky Bratton’s notion of ‘intertheatricality’).
Issues of re-contextualisation were explored further later in the seminar when discussing
settlement (see below). In thinking further about what did not move, ideas of the barriers
to circulation, or of blockages in flow were also raised, working in tension with those
factors that encourage movement. For instance, the plays of Nobel-winning playwright
Patrick White have become canonical in Australian theatre in recent years, and his plays
have circulated around Australia in a way that they did not in his life, but Liz’s
fascination lies with the fact that despite his renaissance and being awarded a Nobel prize
for literature, none of his plays have been performed here, including Ham Funeral which
is set and was written in the UK. So she was interested in why this movement had not
occurred and suggested that in part this was because his signification of Englishness was
peculiarly local to Australia.
The notion of trade and circulation was also important as what can be marketed, what can
be sold, impacts on what circulates where. So if Australian productions of Shakespeare
are not enough of a critical or commercial success in the UK then they will not be
followed up with tours of other Australian productions. Economics also influences the
form products take and the extent to which they are remade as they circulate, particularly
regarding fashionability. For instance, knowledge about Malaysia circulated among
Europeans, but the tradition of writing about Malaysia influenced the form of Conrad’s
writings. In playing against notions of trade, piracy and his work on Malaysia, Robert
highlighted how the popular circulation of stories in Europe about Christian and Lost
Kingdoms, particularly King Solomon’s Mines and the search to locate the Great
Zimbabwe rested on the fact that Great Zimbabwe could not be built by Africans,
therefore Europeans must have travelled to build it. He also raised the issue of
commercial sectors of publishing and the development of parallel systems such as
readings, self- or small-scale publishing, and the role of digital media and electronic
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magazines. Digital media influence the transmission and publication of texts, as well as
the form such texts take, particularly with digital poetry. Issues of copyright and
commercialization are critical to creativity, and the relationships between them alter in a
digital age. Mediatization will be discussed further in the final roundtable.
The final area that participants discussed was that of location, dislocation and settlement.
For instance when instruments travel, how they are made sense of, how they are played,
their technologies, and their symbolic meanings, can be taken with them, but also altered.
These histories are impacted by contact, power relationships, values, communication and
degrees of agency. To illustrate this Henry played some flutes that looked like recorders.
Recorders were brought into the Andes by the Spanish to be used in Christian services
but whilst the flutes have been derived from these instruments they have a different
aesthetic and timbre when played. They also have a new life in the Andean context, they
have been ‘digested’ and transformed in a way that reflect local values and the ecological
environment. However the Andean music with which we are familiar is very different
aesthetically and can be traced to the travel of people from the Andes to Paris where the
genre developed as the Parisian elites could accept a style of playing that was changed
aesthetically, but which indigenous people find hard on their ears.
Similarly Liz described how Shakespeare was tied up with the colonizing project, as she
suggested that Shakespeare affected how colonisers saw indigenous people. The Tempest
in particular was part of the intellectual luggage that went with white settlers and
Shakespeare worked as an instrument of settlement along with the Bible. In working
against this history, postcolonial Australian theatre challenges this colonizing influence,
unsettling associations of Englishness by using local accents, meanings, and references.
Australian productions of Shakespeare deliberately reject English styles of acting that
focus on the voice and instead emphasise the use of the body, physical action, energy,
and stage presence. Yet a tension remains as Australians are still working with
Shakespeare which remains an instrument of settlement. Rather than ask ‘why do it?’ she
is keen to bring an Australian voice and critique to Shakespearean theatre production and
literary criticism, both of which remain largely dominated by the UK and North America.
Robert similarly talked about the relationship between settlement and unsettlement,
focussing on how poetry anthologies work to settle poems and bring them together, but
also how they always have an agenda, taking individual works out of context and
changing how they are read. As a result, a poem’s original context is no longer thought
of, nor is the fact that there may be many different versions of an ‘original’ poem.
Introducing students to these multiple versions unsettles their assumptions, highlighting
how particular versions of poetry become settled, and how circulation can mask, not only
produce, multiplication.
Audience Discussion
Audiences focussed on the circulation of music in a pre-globalization period, where
copyright legislation was not uniform, so people would publish their work in different
places. They also discussed the circulation of styles through the travel of itinerant or
gypsy musicians who learned the idioms of music in the places they travelled to for
commercial reasons, and then transferred some of these styles between contexts.
Audience members asked how different was this to the contemporary movement of style
and the effects of new technology?
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Whilst people experiment with different musical styles, they are circumscribed to a
certain extent by what people will consume and what they accept as authentic. However,
pirated cds highlight how authenticity relates to multiplicity as vendors add ‘special
edition’ labels to make cds seem authentic, taking elements from the original and
reworking them into the copy, rather than making an exact copy. So there is a tradition of
making multiple different copies in the marketing of pirated music in Bolivia and Peru.
In the globalized theatre marketplace, there are productions that are tightly copyrighted
such as The Lion King which are reproduced identically across the world. Amidst this, a
production such as Dirty Dancing masquerades as being a non-Australian product, but
every movement is copied from the original Australian production, so its cultural
identification is masked even as it is reproduced. Similarly, the circulation of acting style
was questioned, of the distinction between body (Australian) and voice (English)
techniques, and whether a more Australian, or bodily style of Shakespeare was
performed here. Whilst Shakespeare is stylized bodily in ways that are seen as
Australian, in England these methods are not connected to Australia, but to other
traditions that are seen as ‘alternative’.
Audiences also debated how the relationship between travel and the opening up of a
dialogic space affected poetic style. Robert suggested that he didn’t want to engage with
an American poetics in his style, and that one of the criticisms of the genre in which he
writes is that it is too American. Although some travels involve meeting American poets
through textual and literal exchange, whether that results in the production of a single
style is open to debate as it operates through a network of associations and whilst there
may be a movement across space, there may not be a movement across aesthetic style.
A final comment centred on space and the production of locality. Some audience
members referred to Nigel Clark’s work, emphasising how staying still involved effort,
and Robert was asked to comment on how writing involved overlayerings and labour. He
discussed how his work on Liverpool involved different workings through of historical
layers, so in one sense this involved staying still in one place (the British Library) but
movement became temporal. He drew parallels between his own poems and the work of
Terence Davis, with the focus on being removed spatially and temporally from a place,
such that you can’t go back to somewhere because it doesn’t exist any more. In thinking
about the dynamics that make things stay in place, Henry commented on how rituals
bring indigenous people back to a place, but they do not necessarily stay there, creating a
tension again between movement, settlement, and re-settlement. Discussion focussed on
the re-creation of indigenous ethnic groups by the Bolivian government, how these were
being imposed onto places where they didn’t previously exist, and the tensions
surrounding this process. Liz suggested that in theatre stillness can only be a pretence or
about proving one’s self worth; Peter Jackson famously said that Hollywood came to him
and by extension to New Zealand to produce The Lord of the Rings, he did not travel to
them. This finished on a related note that touring and movement can be expensive in the
arts - that in fact it is much cheaper to stay still in place.