pro-theatricality (1 of ??)

 

Adam Ant in conversation with Dave McCullough, Sounds, April 4 1981

Alice or Adam? 

Adam, anointed by the Fairy Godmother Diana Dors, gains admittance to the pantheon of British light entertainment and variety

Playing for the Queen

Also billed as a Royal Command Performance

From Rip It Up:

"Adam ended 1981 with a spectacular, no-expense-spared tour, the Prince Charming Revue. The word “revue” signaled that he’d moved into the realm of pure showbiz.

"In interviews, Adam talked in vague terms about providing kids with hope, a positive alternative to “the rock rebellion rubbish”. He claimed he was perfectly happy offering escapist entertainment a la Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark.  And he defended his squeaky-clean image: "I'm sick and tired of being told that because I don't drink or smoke or take drugs that I'm a goody-two shoes.… I don't like drugs and that is a threat to the rock'n'roll establishment...” The art school student who hung around McLaren & Westwood's SEX and Seditionaries stores, thrilled by the fetish clothing and images of the Queen with a safety pin through her nose, now proudly performed at the Royal Variety Show, an annual charity event featuring Britain’s  top entertainers. "It would have been exactly the negative inward looking rock thing to have turned it down. If people think I'm clean and boring for shaking hands with the Queen then that's up to them... What would be outrageous? To spit at her? Drop me trousers? That's rock and roll rebellion and, like I say, I want nothing to do with that."

bow down

On the occasion of her documentary film about her tour about her album Renaissance Beyoncé has gotten some flak for not taking a stand on Gaza and for allowing the film to be screened in Israel

In an acerbic Vulture piece, Angelica Jade Bastién  says "there is no star of such magnitude who more cunningly positions themselves as apolitical than Beyoncé. Her performance as an icon is meant to connect with the broadest number of people possible. To do that, her refusal to stand for anything specific beyond the watered-down treatises on Black excellence must be maintained."

She examine how Beyoncé traffics, in this film and earlier ones, in "fake intimacy":  

"Every time you think you’ve seen behind the curtain, you realize there’s another curtain upon another stage. This isn’t new for her. Consider previous projects like the labored 2013 film Life Is But a Dream and the more successfully realized Homecoming in 2019. From this vantage point, fake intimacy is a currency she utilizes to give the appearance of revelation even if she actually remains as closed as a fist. Beyoncé positions herself not as a goddess bestowing a peek of humanity to her loyal subjects but as a relatable figure we can and should connect with. But if you have cameras on you all the time, even when you’re supposed to be “off,” when do you take down the performative mask? It isn’t even when she has knee surgery, a moment carefully documented on camera. For Beyoncé, a woman known to film her every move and house it in a temperature-controlled archive, everything is performance and each performance is merely a means of brand extension."

There are some jaw-dropping facts about the expense and labour (and carbon footprint) of the tour: 

"There were around 160 trucks used merely to transfer the stage from stadium to stadium, and the crowd sometimes numbered up to 70,000. These are not intimate shows but a demonstration of excessive spectacle"

Despite a dedicated moment of spotlighting of all the drones involved in making it happen - "stage hands and builders decked in shining chrome, backup singers and crucial musicians that share the live stage, seamstresses and designers, makeup artists and hair stylists, and dance captains like Amari Marshall" - Bastién says the doc is "still closer to an archival monument for the greatness of its performer, writer, and director.....   More than anything, Renaissance is a testament that Beyoncé is a brand that stands for absolutely nothing beyond its own greatness."

Bastién's casual use of phrases like "loyal subjects" and "aesthetic might" in her otherwise caustic piece reminded me of how baked into Beyoncé discourse are ideas of a/ regality and b/ entertainment as subjugation.  

The regality might partially explain the apolitics - if she's anything like the British monarchy, her reign would be dependent on not taking a stand or speaking out, but being a queen for everybody - a figurehead transcending ideology.

Another recent piece about the Renaissance concert movie is also limned with tropes to do with regality and masochistic evocations of overwhelming entertainment. 

Spencer Kornhaber recalls watching her 2016 tour:  "Even from the nosebleeds, she seemed huge, and impossibly important. I felt like I was watching the Statue of Liberty come alive, declare herself empress of Earth, and twerk." 

By comparison the Renaissance tour felt more collective - about the audience as much as the performer -  and Kornhaber did not "leave the show with the classic Beyoncé feeling of having one’s skull crushed by a higher power."

The film has "plenty of moments" that" will make the viewer feel, to use the lingo of the ballroom subculture that inspired Renaissance, her latest album, gagged by opulence" but he argues that at this point  "Beyoncé... wants her brand to be less about … herself."

Yet, the text still feels the pull of hierarchic imagery: there's a description of her Coachella performance doc Homecoming, which "essentially created a human pyramid with one woman at the apex."

The final paragraphs note sagely that while "great pop stars always gesture to a communal ideal—fans as family, dancing as democracy.. At base, though, they sell dominance and submission: a fantasy of the world’s problems pacified by a noble tyrant." 

While Beyoncé makes these gestures towards sharing the limelight, ultimately the Queen is "hardly surrendering her claim to power and control. As the movie’s credits play, so does a tremendous new song in which she raps, with boxerly aggressiveness, about house—the musical style, the material achievement, the place to host guests and raise families. Implicitly, she’s inviting us all inside her walls. And yet, she very amusingly keeps shouting, “Get the fuck up out my house!” She knows we still want to be commanded—and that not everything she’s got can be shared."

House becomes a palace. 

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Here's my own Beyoncé take from S+ A

2013 February 

Beyoncé’s half-time performance at the Superbowl is the victory lap capping off her global superstardom. Planned for months, costing millions, involving 500 local volunteers to erect the stage in addition to Beyoncé’s own crew, the fifteen-minute mini-concert is a celebration of Queen Bey’s remorseless flawlessness. 

It starts with a taped speech of football manager Vince Lombardi gravely exhorting the pursuit of excellence “with all of one’s might”.  The glamour and clamour, Lombard intones, are just the exterior testament to what really matters: an implacable inner drive to dominate, “the spirit, the will to excel, the will to win.”  Beyoncé literally erupts onto the stage, to the sound of her hit “Run the World.”   For the next fourteen minutes she flexes her vocal training and rehearsed flair amid what seems like hundreds of lights blaring thousands of watts.  It’s a fiesta of feminine incandescence - jets of fire, guitars with roman candles ejaculating sparks from either end of the instrument - with special FX mirroring that “clones” a mini-army of Beyoncés.

Beyoncé at the Superbowl is like the Panopticon in reverse: surveillance turned inside out, “all eyes on me.”  110 million watch it in real-time; many more world-wide catch it later on the Internet.  “All minds on me” too: the performance generates 300 thousand tweets per minute. Critics prostrate themselves like obsequious courtiers. Rolling Stone’s reviewer gushes that the set’s supposed absence of crowd-pleasing favorites indicates that “she’s Beyoncé and Beyoncé can get away with doing whatever Beyoncé feels like doing”  -  less a critical assessment than a curtsey.

The Beyoncé spectacular is nominated in multiple technical categories at the Emmys. But it wins for just one:  “Outstanding Lighting Design/Lighting Direction.”   Deservedly: it’s the overkill climax of an illumination-escalation that has seen awards ceremonies and arena shows get more audience-stunning and retina-bruising with each year.  Light and power have always been linked historically, from the candle power that only lords and kings could afford, to the splendor of bright dyes and glittering gems that shone out in a world of murk and squalor.  Beyoncé at the ‘Bowl is where bling and blitz converge: a tour de force of shock and awe.  

"grotesque with gratitude" (RIP Edna / Barry)

Watching a bunch of Dame Edna Everage stuff  - a doc, chat show appearances, those An Audience With Dame Edna specials done in front of an invited congregation of her peers, people in entertainment  and media and arts, where the guests get to ask sycophantic questions.... it struck me what a clever, penetrating parody of the hierarchism of showbiz had been wrought and sustained for decade after decade.  

In the doc, John Lahr notes the way that Dame Edna constantly reminds her audience of the distance between her and them. They are nobodies, grotesque with gratitude (her phrase I think - I scribbled it down on hearing) for the privilege of admission into her presence.  

Or they are nearer to being nobodies, in the case of the celebs invited to An Audience With Dame Edna or appearing on her own various chatshows. She similarly constantly reminds the guests of their lower rank in the pecking order (the humiliation of having a name tag stuck on their breast, should Edna mentally misplace the name of Gina Lollabrigida or Julio Iglesias). Their starpower wattage is so much dimmer than the supernova of the housewife-turned-superstar (in later declensions, gigastar).

Stardom as noblesse oblige is wittily, wickedly lampooned in her theme song "My Public"

Talking of obsequiousness -  hierarchy - fame as a form of non-hereditary royalty - and indeed Australians...  or even dead Australians.... 

..... how remiss of me not to mention the most embarrassing piece of writing I have ever read in my entire life! 

I refer of course to Clive James, expatiating in The New Yorker upon the subject of his "love" for - and his close personal relationship with - Princess Diana. 

The cultural cringe is harrowing to witness.

Such suppurating humility and humble-braggery...  but worse still is the way James tries to balance Diana-adoration with staying on the right side of then-Prince Charles - there's a lot of forelock-tugging about the virtues and admirable qualities of the monarch-to-be.  

Back to Barry Humphries.... you can talk about Bowie and Blackstar and the elegance of the way he stage managed his exit from public life... but maybe this surpasses: the dying entertainer arranges for his comedic creation to compose the "eulogy" for one of the quality newspapers... 

Oh and here's another self-written obituary, for an Australian paper

Clive James is actually in the audience for this sequel to An Audience With Dame Edna and asks her a "probing" question. 

Yet another audience (this time 1988)

The Aussie version 

An early documentary

I think this effort below is the doc I watched - good contributions from Germaine Greer and others, with stuff about the bohemian demimonde of 1950s Melbourne, Humphries as the dandy aesthete flaneur provocateur.

I have actually sat through the whole of this Barry McKenzie movie, I'm not sure if I could say this was an hour-plus well spent... 

Humphries had a great passion for Dada and Surrealism and the whole épater le bourgeois bit. As a teen I was impressed when I read about his pranks e.g. going on an airplane flight and secretly filling the air sickness bag with Heinz Sandwich Spread, then later - during turbulence ideally - pretending to puke copiously into the bag, making so much noise that everyone in the vicinity noticed ... only to immediately, with a flourish, produce a spoon from his pocket and commence to eat his own regurgitate. This exploit had a similar admiration-stirring and aspirational effect on me as reading about Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell's defilement of library books.

Ah here's the story, as kept in an old scrapbook of mine circa the age of 15. A different Heinz product, but otherwise exactly as I remembered - shows the impression it made on teenage me!

One expression of Humphries's antagonism to the conventional was his interest in abject arcana and human peculiarity, which resulted in the compendium Bizarre.

Which I picked up surprisingly cheap a few years ago. But I confess to being somewhat underwhelmed - the contents are not nearly as grotesque and disturbing as e.g. Apocalypse Culture or even things that my old pal Paul Oldfield would assemble out of pages photocopied from Victorian era encyclopedias full of strange antiquities and anthropological curiosities from all around the world, the freakshow appeal masked by a fig-leaf of edification.

Still, in 1965 when it came out - well before Humphries became anything like a household name - Bizarre would probably have been mind-bending stuff.

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Looking at that 15-16 years of age scrapbook, I was surprised to see no less than two Dame Edna features cut out and glued in there. Music was creeping in as an interest, but the bulk of the stuff in there is either science fiction / futurology / alternate history, or it's comedy related (the post-Python diaspora). Don't laugh, but at one point, I thought my future would be in comedy... 

Lots of rank-pulling and pecking-order pokes vis-a-vis her fellow thesps in the above!

An early cameo as one of the Seven Deadly Sins - Envy - in Bedazzled, which might be my favorite filmed comedy, although there's a lot of competition. 

via Andrew Parker, the work that Clive James was most proud of -  the series Fame in the 20th Century