Originally published at ABC Arts Online, October 2013
Despite
such things as spectacular pyrotechnics, projections, elaborate costume
changes, theatrical melodrama and even gargantuan puppetry, the art of live
performance today, rather than symbolising human artistic and technological
advancement, actually represents something primitive: a basic compulsion that
goes deep into cultural history and anthropology.
So
says Drones frontman and solo artist Gareth Liddiard, anyway.
“Live
performance is very natural and is something human beings have always done, there’s
a ceremony to it,” he says. “It’s like owning a dog – it kind of makes sense
and is something people have done for millennia.”
Liddiard
was one of 20 musicians who took part in Jasmin Tarasin’s much-lauded LIVE
project, a series of films of artists performing directly into a single,
stationary camera leaving a stark, yet quite stunning, impression. Tarasin
attracted such global names as Jarvis Cocker, Rufus and Martha Wainwright,
Feist and Peaches with Liddiard joined by fellow Australians including folkie
Laura Jean, idiosyncratic singer-songwriter Dan Kelly (nephew of Paul) and
Spiderbait drummer and solo performer Mark ‘Kram’ Maher. With Sarah Blasko, all
five performed at the opening of LIVE as a video installation as part of the
Sydney Festival in 2011.
These
videos are confronting for both artist and viewer, in their unflinching
insistence on what performance is when all decoration, theatre and even
personality is stripped away. Tarasin’s films are psychological incisions, and
a brave kind of self-portrait on the part of the participants. Maher describes
the project as “miniaturising everything” and “like looking into a window of
someone.”
And
naturally, Liddiard, Jean, Kelly and Maher found the experience thrilling and
enlightening in its ‘back to basics’ approach, in contrast to the over-rehearsed
extravaganzas that some of the world’s biggest artists rely on. Maher, for
example, bemoans a Green Day concert he attended that left him bored with its
precision choreography.
Tarasin’s
work, like much art, is grasping at something if not quite on the brink of
being lost, then certainly generally too profound and intimate for a popular
music culture that often plays to the galley through bombast, populism and ego,
that can only separate performer from audience. “Live performance originated in
trying to embrace people, not push them away,” says Liddiard.
For
these four artists, it seems the key to that is giving an audience the
unadulterated present moment, in all its intensity, ugliness and imperfection.
“Whenever
I get on stage I have a moment and look around, and just be there,” says
Melbourne-based Jean. “I find when I am in the moment like that it’s much
easier to work with what’s in the room and make a connection.”
To
deliver an appropriate intensity, and indeed to establish the frisson of a
connection between artist and audience, each of these performers admits a
degree of ‘letting go’ is required.
“I
tend to allow for the fact I can’t control a situation at all,” says Jean. “I
can’t control my performance to a certain extent and I can’t control the
audience’s perceptions. So all I can do is try and be in the moment with the
song.”
For
Liddiard, the process of letting go comes as a result of the mechanical side of
things – co-ordination and “muscle memory” – becoming second nature, resulting
in what could be described as an altered state.
“It’s
sort of a trance, and you just fall into the song and it’s strange. It’s like
that feeling when you’re coasting down the runway on an aeroplane just as the
wheels leave the ground – that’s what a good show feels like. After the gig you
try to remember parts of it, but you can’t because you were just in another
zone.”
With
this devotion to delivering ‘the moment’ comes a certain honesty – quite beautifully
captured by Tarasin in LIVE. For Dan Kelly, however, known for dressing up,
playing multiple characters and spoken-word narratives, live performance has
been a means of disguise, which made participation in LIVE all the more of an
exposure. Even when performing this simply, he wore a turban, sunglasses and
used a drum machine and samples.
“I’ve
often had a barrier up,” says Kelly. “My stuff is quite dense, with a lot of
double meaning and maybe a bit cynical and smart-arse. I don’t know why, it’s
just what I’ve always done, it’s a way of hiding.”
Tarasin’s
films ask the question of live performance’s role in contemporary music, and by
association the importance of live performance for each of these artists in the
context of their own careers. When asked if playing live represents the purest
form in which their music can be presented, each offer compelling answers. For
Liddiard, playing live is “a lot more straight up” than recording, which he
refers to in terms of “manipulation” and the capacity to “really mess with the
whole theatre of it.”
For
Jean, it is the process of songwriting that is the essence of her art, with
performing just the communication of that initial creativity. Kelly believes
his art lies in storytelling, which infuses all of writing, recording and
performing, with the notion of a single pure form being disingenuous to him.
Finally,
Maher says: “I think all parts are just as pure. Every songwriter I know enjoys
both processes [performing and recording], they’re just very different.
“I
love the spontaneity of playing live, you’re never quite sure what’s going to
happen, and you really don’t want to know.”
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