The Curios Carnival: Theatrimusicality, Avant-Garde Pianism and the Carnivalesque

Title The Curios Carnival: Theatrimusicality, Avant-Garde pianism and
the carnivalesque Author(s) Marcus Tan Copyright © 2022 Cambridge University Press This is the author’s accepted manuscript (post-print) of a work that was accepted and published in a revised form in TDR: The Drama Review, 66(3), 52-63. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1054204322000296
Journal: TDR
Abstract:
Theatricality in music performances is often regarded as extraneous or detrimental to the sense of musicality and the music. The works of renowned avant-garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan, however, exploit this intermediality between theatricality and musicality to demonstrate how theatrimusicality – the theatrical constitutive of the musical – is imperative to the receptive experience of the music. Curios (2015) is one such example in which the work’s structure of meaning, and the experience of the carnivalesque, is evoked through such a theatrimusical dramaturgy.
Cambridge University Press
the Carnivalesque
Marcus Tan
In the first movement of her notable performance Curios (2015),
renowned professional toy pianist Margaret Leng Tan steps onto
the stage wearing a monkey mask, and gestures to the audience in
acknowledgement of their presence.1 The audience seems surprised
for the applause is delayed and muted; such a gesticulation is
formalistically given at the end of a music recital or
performance but is here done at the beginning instead. Tan is
flanked by two toy pianos but moves to sit on an undersized
stool placed in between them instead. Once seated, she picks up
a box, unties the ribbon, lifts its lid and places each of the
box’s contents on the stage floor – they are children’s wind-up
toys; among them is the iconic cymbal-clapping monkey. She
cranks the toys and lets them wobble across the stage. The
soundscape of ticking hands from what is plausibly a grandfather
clock increases in volume and fills the auditorium as the
cranking noise of the toys, now amplified, interweave with the
hypnotic ticking sounds; an atmosphere of ominous curiosity is
evoked.
expertly plays on the toy piano, with evident gestures and
movements of a highly trained classical pianist, but a sense of
alienation and inversion of expectations permeates because Tan
disrupts this musical formality by wearing what resembles a
Chinese red lantern over her head throughout this movement. In
another segment, Tan’s piano playing is interjected with sudden
pauses and Tan striking her own head with a squeaky toy hammer.
While seemingly humorous, the theatrical action is cardinal to
the movement’s musicality, its performativity and its reception.
More importantly, it composes and communicates the dramaturgical
intention of Curios – the world of the carnival, a world, as
Mikhail Bakhtin claims, turned upside down.
These excerpts exemplify Tan’s performative signature: a
musicality engendered by theatricality, and where theatricality
is imperative to musicking.2 Tan is one of the world’s leading
virtuosos in experimental piano music and is known
internationally for making famous a child’s toy piano as an
instrument of serious music. Yet what is most distinctive about
Tan, as a musician, is not the novelty of playing the toy piano
but her theatrimusicality – how she actively incorporates
theatrical act/ion(s) in her performances as a means of
interpreting and animating the musical work. In an interview,
Tan describes her theatricality as a “logistics of movement” in
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which gesture becomes choreography and such a choreography is
determined and demanded by the piece. It is a choreography in
which the work evokes expression and interpellates a movement
response (Tan 2020). When performing Guy Klucevesek’s Sweet
Chinoiserie (1998), for example, Tan played two pianos
simultaneously, in addition to an accordion, and created
theatrical music with soya sauce plates and empty tuna fish
cans. In Hatta (2015), Tan played two toy pianos at opposing
ends while moving various chess pieces on a chess board located
between; she also boiled water in a kettle and made tea on
stage. Sonicities from these actions were part of the musical
composition, as were the theatricalities themselves.
Recognisably, theatrimusicality is the hallmark of Tan’s
musicianship and this article purports the importance of
examining this intermediality of theatricality and musicality,
or theatrimusicality, with Curios (2015) as exemplification. In
the world of classical music, any stimulating visual
choreography by the performer is disparaged, and sound remains
the imperative basis for the evaluation of the musician’s
performance (Tsay 2013: 14580). A corollary to this is that
theatricality – “non-serious,” extraneous and excessive
gesturing, body movement, facial expressions – is ruinous to the
performance and an inappropriate stage deportment for it
seemingly exposes poor understanding of musicality and an
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attempt to obscure the musician-performer’s lack of expertise or
deep interpretation of the work. In avant-garde pianism – a term
Tan uses to describe her musical style and performance mode –
theatricality is imperative to the musical work’s aesthetic and
interpretative reception. It is not simply about the creation of
musical fictions through and with theatricality but also about
the spectator’s “awareness of a theatrical intention addressed
to him” (Féral and Bermingham 2002; it is a process of “looking
at or being looked at […], an act initiated in one of two
possible spaces: either that of the actor or that of the
spectator. In both cases, this act creates a cleft in the
quotidian that becomes the space of the other, the space in
which the other has a place” (Féral and Bermingham 2002: 98).
Curios exemplifies how theatrimusicality is essential to
the performance’s affective and interpretative meaning
particularly in evoking Bakhtin’s spirit of the carnival, the
carnivalesque. Theatrimusicality is distinctly a portmanteau of
“theatricality” and “musicality,” where the collocation of both
terms implies an interaction of both concepts in which the
adjectival placement of theatri- entails not simply musicality
that is emergent and consequent of theatricality but also of
theatricality’s effect on musicality, specifically how the
sonic, musical, and acoustical resound in ways determined by
theatricality. Theatricality articulates the music; it is
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transformed in a way that they become open for additional
meanings other than the musical” (Hübner 2013: 3).
Theatrimusicality can, as such, be understood as movements that
enact not simply the work’s musicality, its formal properties
(such as volume and rhythm) but also its extramusical qualities
– the emotional, ethereal, theoretical, and ideological. It is
an action pattern that “produces music, is encoded in music” but
also “made in response to music” (Jensenius 2010: 19). In
simultaneously listening to the sonicities produced, and seeing
the gestural, interpretative and affective meanings are
conveyed.
Curios (2015) remains one of the most noteworthy expressions of
Tan’s theatrimusicality. Composed by Chinese American composer,
Phyllis Chen, and commissioned by the Singapore International
Festival of the Arts for a 2015 premiere in Singapore, Curios is
not a musical recital and not about music per se but an
intermedial composition:
[Curious is] a multimedia work that draws the audience into
a musical and theatrical Cabinet of Curiosities (a
“Wunderkammer”), revolving around the bizarre, bewitching
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Sticky Note
Please add end note if not too late: “Curios was a part of Cabinet of Curiosities commissioned by the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) co-produced by CultureLink Singapore, and first performed on 27 August 2015.”
6
world of the carnival. Whether it be a roomful of carousels
or a magic lantern, the “Wunderkammer” beckons to us to
enter a novel visual and sound world with Margaret as our
guide. Using toy pianos, toy instruments and other
oddities, Curios is inspired by an intriguing 1920s
photograph Margaret gave me of three Kassino clowns. This
rather grotesque, haunting image embodies our shared
fascination with the carnival and is entirely in-synch with
Margaret’s natural ability to convey both humour and
poignancy through her artistry (Chen, Culturelink.com.sg,
n.d.).
Chen’s description of her compositional inspiration alludes to
Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorizing of the medieval carnival as a site
of subversion, contradiction and cohabiting dualisms – of that
which is both fascinating yet grotesque, humorous yet poignant –
but it also underscores the work as a consequence of the
intermediality between musicality and theatricality. Curios is a
performance of obversions, inversions and opposites in form,
inspiration, and reception. In underscoring these paradoxes
through theatrimusicality, Curios captures Bakhtin’s spirit of
the carnival and transposes what is essentially a literary
concept to a performative, embodied experience.
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Even as a work of experimental piano music, Curios disrupts
expectations for it is a site of theatrimusical intermediality,
a space and time where such interplays of sonic and visual
inversions engender the carnivalesque. Curios invites the
spectator-listener to experience contradictory affects and
provokes change in one’s understanding of musicality. Performed
on a theatre stage (at Singapore’s School of the Arts Studio
Theatre), as opposed to a concert hall or recital studio, the
dedicated functionality of the space is upturned and overturned
as the stage is strewn with wind-up toys, toy pianos, a
psaltery, a cuckoo organ, temple bells, singing bowls and music
boxes. A space dedicated to theatre performances is now
transformed into one in which aural attention becomes equally
imperative. This, however, is not to claim that theatre
performances do not involve aurality but, rather, the musical
dimension or musicality has often been regarded as secondary in
the Western stage’s mise-en-scène, apart from contemporary
postdramatic forms such as Composed Theatre.3 Likewise, in a
setting of a music performance (such as an orchestral or
operatic work, or recital), the sonic and musical are principal
to the experience of the performance even as there is a vivid
visual dimension. Recognizably, these dichotomies have been
persistently interrogated and overturned in avant-garde and
postmodern performance and so this unintended inversion of
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then becomes a relevant metaphor of Curios as carnival. The
carnivalesque performance (and the performance of carnival)
becomes the “cleft in the quotidian space” (Féral and Bermingham
2002: 97), the “‘other’ space” (Féral and Bermingham 2002: 105)
that interrogates existing hegemonic discourses of what music is
and how it is to be performed.
Explicit theatricality, in the form of “extra-musical”
elements, that engenders the musical environment is most evident
in the first movement earlier introduced: “March” exemplifies
the disruption of expectation and the introduction of musical
“otherness.” Tan’s playful theatricality (of playing with wind-
up toys as “instruments”) sets up the inverted world of the
carnival. Curios begins with an inversion of customs and norms –
where audiences are prompted to applaud as they would at the end
of a show but here are indicated to do so at the beginning, with
a gestural signifier of performance conventions. The applause if
then followed by a sideshow of triviality and “infantilism.” The
absurdity is, however, juxtaposed with a portentous soundscape
composed of ticking clocks. Along with the buzz from the wind-up
toys in motion, the rhythmic pulse of the clocks amplified
signifies mortality and engenders a sinistrous undertone. The
resultant experience is of a carnivalistic mesalliance where
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what is distinct or opposite reunites and becomes collocated in
the present moment. In doing so, the opening movement “re-tunes”
the audience’s ears to experience incidental sound, rhythm and
time as music and compels us to look not only at the performer
but the other non-animate actors that themselves produce music
as they “perform.”
1. Tan, wearing a monkey mask, cranks the wind-up toys (Photo
credit: Singapore International Festival of the Arts).
Almost as if to further underscore this curious
mesalliance, one of the wind-up toys collapses as it teeters
away after being given life. Tan picks up the fallen toy and
tries to keep it upright as it journeys along but such attempts
fail, and she waves her hand at the toy in surrender. This is a
moment of disrupted yet doubled theatricality, where an
intentional theatrical act is foiled by the actor’s unintended
metatheatrical inaction. The toy’s failure to perform (both to
“act” and to fulfil its task) assumed an additional dimension of
theatricality which adumbrated the carnivalesque spirit. There
were soft sniggers from spectators when the toy “refused” to
perform, and while such comic reaction is fathomable, they can
be regarded as a reflexive recognition of the shattering of the
theatrical frame. Laughter is, as Bakhtin observes, the basis of
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the carnival spirit, and this laughter is not a subjective,
individual one but a “social consciousness of all the people”
(Bakhtin [1965] 1984b: 92); it regenerates and creates a
carnival sociality and communality. Interpretatively, this
theatrical moment is also significantly “anti-theatrical” since
Tan’s attempts to correct the unexpectedness of the toy’s anti-
theatricality, and her eventual capitulation, is metonymic of
the carnival as an inversed world – where the unstructured,
unanticipated and random now occupy the same time and space of
the sanctioned, structured and intentional.
Even as this highly theatrical sequence of playing with
toys is perceived as “non-serious,” perhaps superfluous, the
resultant soundscape produced from the cranking motors of the
wind-up toys harmonizing with a recorded soundtrack of other
wind-up toys unwinding and interposed with the strident, regular
rhythms from a ticking clock become imperative to creating
atmospheric (and affective) conditions of the carnival as a
space of paradox and enigma. The soundscape not only attunes one
acutely to how any sound is (and can be) regarded as music but
sonically signifies an “other” time of an “other” place. The
theatrimusicality of this movement engendered a sense of unreal
time, of time dilation experienced audially, and a time and
space of Curios as carnival.
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Avant-garde music disrupted conventional positions and
conformations of the musician’s performing body, as John Cage’s
prepared piano series did, requiring the pianist to stand,
pluck, strum or hit the piano strings while moving around the
piano and gesturing. This is in contrast to how classical
concert pianists are expected to perform the body on stage;
world famous Chinese concert pianist Lang Lang, for example, is
known to irk music critics because his highly theatrical
performativity.4 Rudolf Laban describes these normative
expectations as imaginary boxes surrounding and limiting the
performer and his range of motion; he names these boxes
“kinespheres” (Laban 1963: 10). Such kinespheres are mental
constructs that the performer is aware of before, during and
after performing the musical work. In a piano performance,
kinespheres include the “home position” where the pianist sits
upright in front of the piano, with bent arms on the laps; there
is also the “start position” where the elbows are bent, the
wrists are at the edge of the keyboard and fingers touch lightly
on the keys; the “performance position” involves the pianist
moving his hands and fingers left to right, forward and
backward, up and down, in or off contact with the keyboard
(Jensenius et al. 2010: 20-21). One can further subdivide
kinespheres into different performance and gestural spaces –
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boxes for various types of musical gestures. These are gestural
spaces that include the sound-producing kinesphere (hitting the
keys), sound-modifying kinesphere (using the pedals), and the
ancillary kinesphere (limited to the upper body and the head,
where any action is deemed as supplemental or extraneous to the
music) (Jensenius et al. 2010: 20-25). These kinespheres address
the expectations of audiences; breaking any of the kinespheres
engenders novelty and surprise, or even disapproval.
Such kinespheric transgressions are evident in Tan’s
performance of Curios not only as a feature of avant-garde music
but as way to evoke the carnival world. Tan performs two
identities and brings together two worlds: the classical music
world as a professional pianist and Steinway performer and the
carnival world of her toy piano playing. In the fourth movement,
titled “Kassino Interlude,” Tan seats at a toy grand piano. Her
posture accommodates the expected kinespheres of a trained
classical pianist. Even though she is about to play on the toy
grand, the movement within each kinesphere remains identical to
that of a concert pianist playing on a full-sized piano: sound-
producing gestures, sound facilitating gestures (phrasing and
entrained gestures), and sound-accompanying or communicative
gestures (such as raising the arms and wrists after an emphatic
sequence is played) (Jensenius et al. 2010: 24-25) are evident.
Yet these expected kinespheres are punctuated by comical and
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idiosyncratic movements and actions that persistently subvert
the seriousness of play(ing): Tan wears the red nose of a clown
during this segment; at intended rest marks, she picks up a
yellow plastic toy hammer and hits her head with it producing
the characteristic “squeak” that disrupts the reverberating
sonicities from the toy piano. These sequences end as abruptly
as they begin, and Tan reverts to “serious” piano playing. At a
particular juncture, as the music crescendos and increases in
tempo, she pauses, puts her hands on her ears, gasps, and shakes
her head from left to right. This theatrimusical sequence could
be read as an autoreflexive moment where common conceptions of
avant-garde piano music are regarded as “noise.” As the music
continues, Tan interjects serious play with strident sonicities.
At one interval, she picks up two clown horns and squeezes them;
at another, she blows into a shrill-sounding whistle as she
places her right wrist above her brow and turns her head from
left to right, a gesture akin to someone looking afar for
something. “Kassino Interlude” ends with Tan, still seated in
front of the toy grand, picking up a soft toy dog and hugging it
closely while humming a melancholic tune.
The perforation of kinespheres by theatrical actions, and
the intensification of sound-accompanying or communicative
gestures can be seen as extraneous and simply comic. Yet, the
active, intentional incorporation and arrangement of these
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spirit and phenomenological reception of the work as indicators
of the dualisms characteristic of the carnival. It is not simply
the juxtaposition of “non-serious” theatrical (and sonic)
actions – such as the blowing of a whistle, hitting one’s head
with a toy hammer, humming to, and hugging, a toy dog – with the
apposite gestures and kinespheres of “serious” piano playing;
the carnivalesque dualism of “Kassino Interlude” is evoked
because of the sonic quality of the toy grand piano as well, and
where the common regard for it being a child’s toy (and
therefore played as a toy) contrasts distinctly with Tan’s
kinespheric movements of a professional concert pianist. Seeing
Tan move as a concert pianist while listening to the “imperfect”
frequencies and distinctive sonicities of the toy piano can
possibly generate a visual-aural disjuncture that is alienating.
This sonic-visual disjunction elicits an alienation
characteristic of the carnivalesque. The reverberating overtones
that create complex overlaps and collisions of frequencies
engender an intriguing yet portentous atmosphere; the sight-
sound incongruity underscores the cleft in the quotidian that is
Curios as carnival.
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Consonant with the spirit of Bakhtin’s carnival, Curios is
occupied by images and references to the grotesque body. The
body as a “stage for eccentricity” (Lachmann 1988-1989: 146) is
a key concern for Bakhtin since the hideous, deformed and
macabre bodies with apertures or convexities signified not
simply grotesquery but growth and birth; the grotesque body is
“a body in the act of becoming” (Bakhtin [1929] 1984a: 317) and
like the carnival, it is a corporeal material site for
regeneration and restitution.
between videated bodies and the live performing body. It is
“played” with and against the musicality of various segments as
a means of evoking the phantasmagoric undercurrents and dark
tonalities that further engender the carnivalesque dualism. This
provocative image of the grotesque body is most evident in the
photograph of the three Kassino clowns that is the source of
creative inspiration for Curios. The image of unknown origin
found on a postcard, circa 1920, features three midget clowns of
varying proportions standing in front of a tent, their…