The nature of performance is a trinity of delicate balance; a juggling act in itself of realism, talent and hamminess. Any one third of this equation that outweighs the other can often send the act spinning out of control and can cause those watching to turn from captivated to resentful; hell hath no fury like a critic's scorn. And those in the audience should be critical. Performance separates a special one or few from many. If you are going to make the assertion that you are special enough to look at, you'd better be.
However, it's not true that a performance cannot be over the top and completely unlike real life. It's not true that it cannot embody fantasy and the ridiculous, just as it's not true that the other end of the spectrum—bare, stripped-down, Beckett-esque exchanges—can't make for excellent performances. But in each case, whichever quality is heightened, be it hamminess or realism, the other must be calibrated accordingly. In Waiting for Godot, for example, the hamminess must be reduced to the point of barely detectable, and might only beapparent for the simple fact that there is an actor on the stage pretending to be someone other than himself and that actor, presumably, enjoys being there, thus enjoys attention. I guess talent is the emulsifier that makes any performance palatable, but a mediocre singer can get away with his voice if his bravado and effort compensate.
I spent the weekend in New York City to visit friends and attend a bachelorette party on Saturday night. On Friday night, my sister and I attended an of Montrealshow in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was the third or fourth time I had seen the band and was by far the most produced, most stylized and most theatrical of all the performances. What once started out as a typical pop/rock five piece with song construction in the narrative roots of folk have now turned to an all-out experimental rock group with the apparent intent of glamming into outer space like Stardust-era David Bowie. Add dancing ninjas, gold Budda suits, animal masks, huge light panels,and a general sense of sweat, body odor and second-hand, DIY, thrift store griminess and you have this show. Someone even threw dollar bills (not fives, not twenties, not fifties), a silly, happy take on an act that tends to debase an audience, one that suggests the performers need not concern themselves with this paper they have an abundance of, but that the minions of the crowd should clamor for it at the amusement of those on stage.
All of this was followed up by a few encores that had nothing to do with the roar of the crowd (they were planned before the show even started, as my stage manager friend let me know so we could make plans afterwards). Nevertheless, a ringmaster with a giant tiger mask over his head hyped up the crowd and bade them to go wild at his instruction. The final encore featured Janelle Monae, an alien, rockabilly pixie with R&B pipes. Fittingly, her duet with Kevin Barnes (the lead singer for of Montreal who’s been known to get naked from time to time) was of Bowie's "Moonage Daydream" off 1972's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, but the performance of that song had the least amount of production (in terms of costumes and spectacle) and the most amount of what felt like pure rock and roll concert, once-in-a-lifetime eventfulness. I’m not sure if rock and roll can ever embody realism, but it surely can feel gutsy and visceral.
The next night was the bachelorette party, an institution I typically disdain, but the bride-to-be in question is less-than-typical as were the planned events for the evening. Sure, we piled her with gaudy accessories and an itchy veil (the rest of us ended up wearing them for the most part), but we also went to a burlesque show at The Slipper Room in the Lower East Side instead of a strip club.
What I, what we all, expected was a classy retro throwback to the burlesque of yesteryear. We got one such performance. The night was emceed by none other than a very crass Jesus Christ who reminded the patrons they paid only $5 and got to see naughty bits, and encouraged them to tip. His performance and the performances of all the dancers (some of whom were male, some of whom were neither male nor female, or both) were so full of ham as to be positively bacon-y; the excess was fatty and smoky and decadent. A woman dressed as a bird “laid” an egg. Another who did an American themed performance shoved an entire filet-o-fish sandwich from McDonaldsinto her mouth and poured a can of orange pop over herself before washing herself with an American flag and making out with a Barack Obama mask. She was eventually naked, but what made this different for me than a typical strip club was the fact that clearly this was performance, much like the one I had experienced the night before. What is ironic about these performances is that the performers themselves are stripped down and bare, but the performances are so full of artifice. Instead of wearing costumes, the performers wear sex, or the history of sex, or the tradition of burlesque, or the subversion of it—avant-garde stripping as it were. And instead of a hooting ogling audience (with the exception of one drunk guy who kept shoving people to get in and out of the crowd), those watching were mostly enthralled, anticipating not the artificial seeming nudity of Playboy or the strip clubs fifty blocks uptown, but anticipating the unexpected, something they’d never seen before along with a little cellulite and real breasts.
