Wednesday, July 10, 2013

The Art of Talent Show Performance, and Why Classical Artistry is Different

I came across this video several weeks ago:


As I read through the comments of awed viewers, who admired Ms. Rigolo's precision, concentration, and artistry, I thought again about classical performing art forms from around the world--opera, ballet, kabuki, gamelan, in short, the art forms modern consumers usually call "boring". This video, very lengthy by internet standards, features nothing but a woman slowly balancing sticks upon each other until a large structure emerges, accompanied by meditative flute music. While videos of amazing ballet performances languish with merely hundreds of views, why does this balancing act sustain interest, why is it deemed artistic, and why is it so popular? And what can classical performing arts traditions learn from this?

It turns out that the artistic veneer masks a simple dramatic structure straight out of vaudeville. Media scholar Henry Jenkins, in his book The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture, notes how performer-centric and modularly structured evenings of vaudeville acts often eschewed art or storytelling "to focus attention upon the performer's skills, having little or no other interest." But impressive tricks were not enough; a performer's chances of being rehired or paid better depended on the magnitude of the audience's reaction. A tried-and-true formula emerged: steady increases in suspense, up to the point of the "wow climax" or "big wow," the kicker at the end of the act that finally sends the crowd into wild applause. This video relies on exactly such a structure. The costs of failure rise with each successfully placed stick, culminating in the all-or-nothing final balancing of the entire structure on a vertical pole. The crowd goes wild, and Ms. Rigolo even adds what performers call a "button," an extra gesture after the big wow, when she underscores the structure's fragility by toppling it with the initial feather.

Conforming as it does to the standard structure of jugglers, acrobats, or daredevil stuntmen, it is easy to see why this video sustains a mass audience's attention. Yet to go viral online, it must also conform to the emerging laws of what makes something "sharable": it must not only please the viewer, but also be something the viewer will publicly "like" in front of hundreds of online friends. Though sharing online can, in theory, match the intimacy of real-life confidences, the fact remains that online sharing to an audience of hundreds (or thousands) prompts most of us to share items that grab attention, then reflect our desired online self-image. As Lee Siegel noted in a recent New York Times article, "Seeking Out Peer Pressure," the internet "prizes the cute angle, the startling factoid, the arch provocation, qualities that are actually the careful, calculated style of the other-directed person cannily hiding behind an inner-directed facade."

Ms. Rigolo's performance gave viewers multiple reasons to share. The serene aesthetic veneer atop the vaudeville act structure prompted commenters to not only voice their amazement, but also praise the artistry. One commenter even found an exploration of deeper themes, in "the power of one feather in the end." The harmony achieved among the movement, pace, music, and props struck many viewers as artsy, beautiful, or even elevating the display to the level of "performance art". Thus, the video can be shared as any or all of those things. Furthermore, the performance requires no specialized knowledge of artistic forms or traditions to be perceived as artistic, something many traditional performing disciplines cannot so easily claim. The sharer can thus rest assured of reaching the widest possible audience.

Where performing traditions differ
Those already familiar with a classical performing art form can probably already see ways in which those arts diverge from the principles that made this video a success.

First, there's no two ways about it: to understand a classical performance of whatever tradition, at least some specialized knowledge of the tradition is required. Ms. Rigolo's balancing act can appeal widely because everyone can immediately and intuitively understand the difficulty of what she's doing. In classical arts, some aspects of performance share the same immediacy (a pianist playing prestissimo or a soprano's high C), but many don't--many people don't even realize, for example, that opera singers do not use microphones--a fact that makes their singing significantly more impressive.

On top of that, classical performers cannot merely execute difficult maneuvers and hope for applause. Playing "merely" technically well is an insult. Audience interest is sustained through any combination of precision, virtuosity, character, emotional communication, or a sense of taste, and again, understanding how these elements come together, which combinations work and which don't, which are surprising and which passé, requires a gradually acquired audience knowledge of the tradition in question. The uninitiated often find it difficult-to-impossible to follow a performance, and if they're not willing to explore something new that evening, boredom often results.

But mentioning dramatic trajectories brings up another major issue: within themselves and compared with each other, classical performances embrace an infinite diversity of forms. Some value steadily building suspense; some don't. Some embrace climax and emotional outbursts, while others shun them for meditative contemplation of the infinite. The vaudeville form seen in this video came from a specific time, and was calculated to be exciting, not necessarily meaningful. It was a pragmatic form evolved to create a big applause moment at the moment when (as Jenkins points out) the manager would peek around the curtain to see whether to rehire the act. Regardless of the wow climax's artistic potential, it is simply one form among thousands. In classical arts, meaning is important, and the form is often implicitly or explicitly chosen to help convey this meaning. The audience must be knowledgeable and curious about formal possibilities.

Conclusions
When I first watched this, I imagined arts organizations debating whether this video showed evidence of an audience potentially ready for, say, symphony concerts. For me, it's clear that the differences are too great; understanding why this video holds a mass audience's attention allows you to understand why they won't immediately look for a seven-and-a-half minute ballet pas de deux video next. This deepens my conviction that arts marketing needs to distinguish itself from popular media marketing, not ape it, because the experiences are fundamentally different.

Furthermore, many of today's popular marketing books recommend a focus on customers who will do the proselytizing for you--call them early adopters, sneezers, or whatever. The focus should not be on pop culture lovers who already hold negative impressions of classical art forms. I've read a few articles of the "Think opera is old-fashioned? Think again!" variety lately, and all suffer the same delusion: if a sexy lady can sell Coke, she can sell tickets to Carmen. Yet no one complains of always wanting to go to the symphony, but feeling repelled the cellist wasn't model-skinny. While current marketing trends revolve around building relationships, classical music marketing still seems stuck in thinking that getting attention is the end of the game, not the very beginning. We citizens see billions of advertising images per year; we are masters at ignoring things. People don't respond to sexy pop idol posters because of the sex; they respond because they know the singer's name and have a relationship with that "brand". If I don't already have some brand affinity for your opera company or whichever show you're performing, a push-up bra isn't going to sell me.

Instead, arts organizations should be searching vigorously for their "early adopters". Plenty of us have friends or relatives who may not be symphony subscribers, but feel dissatisfied with the commercialization and banality of today's popular culture. Many of these surely have some curiosity about classical art forms, but sexy headshots won't win them over. Increasing this curiosity effectively should be the first priority.

Ultimately, this is extremely important for all art lovers, especially lovers of traditional performance forms. The depth of meaning found in these forms can, perhaps, be rivaled by popular culture at its best, but never surpassed. Along with depth of meaning, traditional forms are irreplaceable windows into countries, cultures, or languages. Deep and real artistic experiences, furthermore, are inherently personal. Art inspires that old-fashioned type of sharing, of vulnerably giving others glimpses of your deeper self. In the end, these are worth more than ten million views.