One word kept springing to my mind as I read this week’s articles: Performativity. The idea of performance as an imperative action in creating a folk culture was mentioned in several of the articles, most poignantly when Filene described the negative reaction Bob Dylan received when he played at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric guitar. What I found most interesting in this example was the fact that not only was Dylan performing, but so were the crowds and the individuals (like Pete Seeger) behind stage. In a public performance like this one, where a change in normative notions of what ‘folk music’ should be occurs, performativity is key in every person’s unique form of identity-making.
My first semester in grad school, I took an archaeology class about public space in Mayan urban centers, and many of our discussions surrounded the idea of performativity and its relation to power, hegemony, and community. In the readings assigned for this very theoretical course, I learned a great deal about the multi-faceted aspects of a public performance, one of the most important being that the individuals whose voices were not heard are of equal importance to those whose voices were broadcast atop the constructed platforms in Mayan public centers. Even in ancient sites like Tikal and Ceibal, there was the ‘public record’ of actions that occurred – those which were recorded in glyphs and sculptures to reflect the hegemonic telling of history – and the ‘private record’ – the inevitable existence of a counter-discourse. (Can you believe there was even such a thing as Mayan graffiti, rushed etchings on the sides of temple walls depicting prominent rulers carrying commoners on their backs?)
With an eye on this dialectical hegemonic/counter-narrative nature of performance, one can look at the folk revival through a new lens. For example, the booing from the crowd enforced the discomfort with change, but the smattering of applause reflected the timid but present group of individuals who would usher in Dylan’s reign of folk-rock. It is not just Bob Dylan’s formal performance (and the performances of many others on the stage) that affected the “end of the folk revival,” but also the thousands of individuals who watched from the crowd. Moreover, we must ask: what about all the people who did not attend these folk festivals, and were never given a chance to perform? Again, the un-acted, unspoken, or in this case unsung, performances are equally important as the dominant narratives unfold before us. We can look at a situation like Lead Belly and John Lomax, and see the inherent power dynamics laden in performativity; Lead Belly may have been performing, but did he really have a voice? I find that power and performance are so intricately linked, especially in the process of identity and group formation. The Mayans erected large public venues in which to perform rituals in order to maintain community cohesion, as well as to reaffirm the strength and power of the ruling class. Again, we can return to a Foucauldian notion of productive power to understand how important performance is in creating, maintaining, and authorizing discourse and identity. When we look at a folk revival, we must keep in mind the voices unheard, the counter-narratives to the already coined counter-culture, in order to understand the full weight and cultural meaning of a performance like that of the Newport Folk Festival.
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