Earlier today we were having this great discussion about how music making is and always will be a communal thing.
And the idea of the person behind the screen, or even the solo person on stage with a guitar is kind of a rarity.
I would love to hear more about your thoughts on that.
I think that for me, the set-up of live performance, music performance in general
it's something that I question, or it's not something that I take for granted.
The idea that you guys are sitting in the room, that I'm most of the time on an elevated space, there's a...
by default, imbalance, in the dynamic because most of the time people come see you
or they might know things and then there are a number of people, and they're also in the dark, and then you are here.
You don't know who these people are, you might not know them the way they know you. You're alone or...
So just that set-up for me is not something I take for granted or that I find normal, it's something I think about.
Also the way that you use the space in performance is so uni-directional,
like, the way that we could be using this space, we're just using it literally in one way.
That's also something I think about.
And how to make things be more of an exchange, which is not always easy.
Between you and the audience? - Yeah, I think that by default there's...
Because of all the things I said there is a gap between this and that. So I think that a lot of the time...
I didn't necessarily do that tonight but I try as much as I can to think about performance
as a way to close the gap between that and this. And there's many ways.
It's like when last time we were together and you did a performance in Toronto and there was a group of
people that you arrived in the city early and found a group and cast some people just from the city to get to know
and to include in the performance.
Really? What kind of performance did they have? - I mean, it was...
It was kind of wild. - Singers? Dancers?
No, no, it was like regular non-artists. - Wow. And what did you invite them to do?
I invited them to imagine. So we spent 2 or 3 days just taking about...
Just a few scenarios that I had in my head, and tried to create the scenes and feelings within that context.
But then it became kind of like therapy, which I wasn't like...
It was an interesting thing 'cos the people who answered to the call I think were already in the predisposition
of being like, "I'm down..." Some kind of openness because it was so vague. It was just like, Hey...
you know what I mean, it wasn't very descriptive so I feel like already that...
invited people who needed something at this moment or wanted to experience something.
But it just went really deep really quickly. And the idea was that they were...
The set-up for them was to inhabit what the arrival means. The arrival in a set-up where you actually have no idea
what any of this is. So not like aliens, but...
more like... yeah, the arrival in a place you have no context for. You've never seen this,
you've never touched. And they had to experience that and then be in contact with people
and create contact with the people in the audience in that moment. So every one of them had a way of doing that.
Yeah, it was pretty wild.
At a certain point the music stopped and they all came out on stage and just kinda stood there
and then went into the audience and started talking with people, interacting with them, telling their stories.
At some point some people were singing, but they weren't necessarily singers or performers
but they were just kind of expressing themselves. The audience was confused, 'cos they were like,
did the concert stop? What is going on? But then their attitude shifted and then they were kinda interested,
and it was like a way to kind of re-frame the performance while it was happening, and then the next song started
and it was like, oh shit, we're back. It was a different...
People had just experienced something else within the space of the concert.
It's also because when you think of music history and you de-zoom from Western places
and de-zoom from the past 30 years, the function of music was so different from this.
It was so much more communal, still is extremely communal.
And there is different kind of states that people get in. It's very difficult to be in any kind of state
if you're sitting in a theater.
Like, I think that the chances for an experience to be cathartic if you're just sitting in a theater are close to zero.
So I think I'm also thinking about it 'cos I want to reconnect with the ways that...
I feel like not such a long time ago it was still like that. So I don't necessarily find this fertile way of doing it.
So... I don't find it satisfying. I'm not sure it's satisfying for people either. When you look at, I don't know,
this Moroccan band from the '70s, I'm blanking on the name.
Nass El Ghiwane? - Yes, exactly. So you have footage of them playing
in this arena and people are just surrounded and they just get completely...
It's not like... They're not just there to take, they just go and clean themselves,
and they get into insane states, and then they have this container, the concert is like a container to
wash and clean and go high and come back.
And it becomes like a thing that can happen regularly. I feel like I don't have that in my life,
containers for that, so I think that's why I'm thinking about...
There's this amazing documentary called Trances from 1981, the Nass El Ghiwane film.
It's about them. And it has this concert footage I think you're discussing.
I wanted to say thank you so much. I know it's very strange to be performing in the moment
and then suddenly the microscope comes out. So let's give a big round of applause to Lafawndah.