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winterI started out in media fandom, where by media I define books, series, films, comics – any creative work that is performed once and communicated via media, a one-to-many single-time-point form of creation. For the past two years, my primary fandoms, the defaults I scribble about in my free moments, have been live performance fandoms. Involvement in the two is a very different experience.
A word of introduction – my live performance fandoms of choice for this essay are musicals, chiefly European and Japanese productions. I think the same principles apply to theatre and even live music, but since I'm most familiar with musicals, I'll use them as examples.
Labyrinth of mirrors
The first issue you run into with live performance is the multiplicity of canon. Each performance is informed by many factors – the space, the director, the performers, the intangible thing that is the mood of the night. This results in many perceptions of the content of the performance. It's even worse between various productions, since they are in different languages, different arrangements, sets, directorial concepts. There is a world of difference, for example, between the spiritual Jean Valjean as played by Drew Sarich on Broadway, John Owen Jones' tragic figure in London, and the benevolent demigod that is Yuichirou Yamaguchi in the Tokyo production. Musicals-wise, this is particularly important with side characters and plots: in Tanz der Vampire, some Herberts are utterly forgettable drag queens, while some (*cough*Wocial*cough*) steal your heart and make you forget even the main characters when they're on the stage. And when chemistry does not exist between the romantic leads, it's hard to interpret their relationship as the true love they sing about.
I think this results in some difficulty in fan interaction, since depending on all those factors, two people can be talking about dramatically different concepts of, say, the Phantom of the Opera. I personally annotate all my fanfiction with the production and castmembers I have in mind – someone who only saw Elisabeth in the Dutch version, with a 100% straight Death, would be very surprised to read a story pairing up Death and Rudolf in the sensual ways inspired by the fact a certain Hungarian performer can't keep his hands to himself. Personally I find it fascinating, but sometimes you do wonder if you're speaking the same language as other fans.
Think of the differences between some shows that were re-edited for certain markets, or cinema and director's-cut versions of various films. Is Deckard an android or a blade runner? It depends on the version you watched. Now take that and multiply it by the number of productions, by the number of actors playing each role, by the number of performances. This is part of the reason that being a fan of live productions is a full-time job.
And that is all dependent on interpretation. Live performances also have different visual looks. In a way, it's freeing – forget arguing about eye colours, the same character in the same production can have three different hairstyles because three people play the role. If a mirror in someone's room is broken, this has a different message than when it's whole. You can draw much from the decorations on someone's house or the mode of his dress, but how to generalise it if you know in a different production the same character decorates and dresses as the polar opposite?
A two-way street
The other side of the single-time-point nature of media fandom is the fact it's mostly one-way. The fan interactions that end up affecting a show are rare, and we pass stories from mouth to mouth, of the fan who became a show writer, of the strange person who asked an author a question that ended up becoming a story, of the girl whose earrings got name-checked in a Pratchett novel. Out of necessity, this happens to one fan in a thousand, one fan in a million.
The nature of the live performance makes the audience a participant even if it's not a piece that asks directly for interaction. The mood of a house can affect the play more than anything; I've seen absolutely knackered and barely-breathing singers rise to new heights because they could feel the audience adored them. It's the laugh and applause, it's the holding of a breath when a complete silence falls across the stage. It's the sound of a thousand people gasping as a chandelier falls. That's where the magic is.
And there's also the fact that it's much easier to get one-on-one interaction a performer. You're not part of millions watching a movie; you're one of maybe a thousand at most people in a theatre, and if you go around the building, you'll probably find the stage door. There are ushers who'll take your flowers or gifts to the right person, even onstage during the curtain calls. If you sit in the front rows, you can get noticed when you gasp or point at things, or just have a deep enough neckline. (Or make fun of a vampire's hand gestures. Just so you know, it's bad form to make a very serious vampire giggle on stage.)
Live performances are so much more personal. This, again, makes for a dedicated fan, and an alone one – this happened to you, the person you're talking with might have no idea about it unless they saw the very same performance, were next to you at the stage door, got their items signed at the same time.
Time is fleeting
An important subset of the musicals fandom are the collectors – most fans end up having a collection at some point, of things most important to them. Being able to revisit the canon is a matter of course for media fans; for a live performance, having a tangible copy of your very experience is often a matter of mad searching, illicit smuggling of recording equipment, or exchanging materials with fans all over the world.
Yes, there are cast recordings for most successful musicals, and there is merchandise. If you are very lucky, there may even be a commercial DVD, though many productions are of the opinion that once there's a DVD, nobody will come to the play anymore. (For why this is fallacy, see above.) But this is not your experience; it's the performers being aware they are being recorded, subduing and fine-tuning their performances accordingly.
A live performance fan's canon exists chiefly in their memory, in the moment where right word was ad-libbed, the wrong person tripped, someone was impatient enough to kick someone else out of their way.
The byproduct of the urge to trap this experience in audio and video recordings is the new accessibility of live performances to people who cannot attend them. Due to prohibitions on recording for copyright reasons, the trade in these productions is underground and arcane, though they exist in a grey legal void. Most of my musicals travels in the past year and a half have been prompted by bootlegs I saw, either as full DVDs or minute-long clips on Youtube: Borchert as von Krolock, Leah Delos Santos as Belle, Uwe and Pia and Szilveszter and Mate. This expands the fandom in ways that the original performers don't expect; some of my favourite performers are Japanese, and one of the things I must see in Japan when I visit is Yuichiro Yamaguchi live on stage.
Lingua Franca
One of the things that is given, in a media fandom, is the cultural context. There are translations, but it's rare to see a translation that changes the location of the story, and it does not change the cultural coloration of the interactions between characters.
Now try that on for size with a live performance that can be set in any country that bothers to buy the license. Here, theatre might be the best bet, with Othello and Hamlet doing everything from climbing Mount Everest to corporate takeovers.
Cats is a musical that's similarly localised – the Polish production name-checked famous restaurants, and completely changed the context of Gus's most famous roles. Instead of TS Elliot's make-believe Firefrorefiddle, he recalls playing Behemoth in Master and Margarita, the fiend-cat ringmaster, the Devil's jester, the Puck of that book and play. This instantly gives him the extra dimension of tragedy in his fall, since this is dramatic greatness we're talking about, and a book beloved to many. As an encore, Growltiger is replaced by the Crimson Pirate, and we add Burt Lancaster to the play.
Even if such liberties are not taken, cultural context informs the performance. Take the difference in emphasis in the productions of Elisabeth, a musical about the life of the Empress-Queen of Austro-Hungary. In Austria, it's about the decadence of Habsburg court. In Hungary, it's about the Hungarian fight for freedom. In Germany, the coming of Nazism overshadows all. And in Japan, they take one look at the tragic figure in love with Death and the rest is so much scenery. The same musical, but four different stories, simply because of the eyes it's prepared for.
I gave you my music
From the point of view of an artist looking for inspiration, live performance is a godsend in one rather underhanded way. If I have a hole in a story in the shape of a kind, protective and reasonably intelligent young man, I can plug it with Luke Skywalker and have everyone notice, reach for Raoul as played by Steve Barton and have some people notice, or recall Lukasz Talik's Raoul and have everyone marvel at my creativity.
By watching many interpretations of the same canon, you can acquire a wide repertoire of possibilities for the same archetype or role. Will my aristocrat attend to his lace cuffs the way Yoshino Keigo does, or shall I recall the way Stanley Burleson managed to keep his straight despite the constant twitching of his hands as Richelieu?
The lessening of my creative output on this journal doesn't have much to do with musicals (rather with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fyrie ^.~ ), but what I do write these days is richer and easier because I have a deeper well of inspiration to dwell on. The immediacy of live performances and the fact the eye isn't directed has also sharpened my observation skills and made me aware of various things I can point out to my readers. I have to say I think live performance fandom has been good for me ^.^
And now, I should probably write another analysis for the fascinating in-between creature that is Takarazuka fandom ;) But at 1,700+ words, this will be enough for now.
A word of introduction – my live performance fandoms of choice for this essay are musicals, chiefly European and Japanese productions. I think the same principles apply to theatre and even live music, but since I'm most familiar with musicals, I'll use them as examples.
Labyrinth of mirrors
The first issue you run into with live performance is the multiplicity of canon. Each performance is informed by many factors – the space, the director, the performers, the intangible thing that is the mood of the night. This results in many perceptions of the content of the performance. It's even worse between various productions, since they are in different languages, different arrangements, sets, directorial concepts. There is a world of difference, for example, between the spiritual Jean Valjean as played by Drew Sarich on Broadway, John Owen Jones' tragic figure in London, and the benevolent demigod that is Yuichirou Yamaguchi in the Tokyo production. Musicals-wise, this is particularly important with side characters and plots: in Tanz der Vampire, some Herberts are utterly forgettable drag queens, while some (*cough*Wocial*cough*) steal your heart and make you forget even the main characters when they're on the stage. And when chemistry does not exist between the romantic leads, it's hard to interpret their relationship as the true love they sing about.
I think this results in some difficulty in fan interaction, since depending on all those factors, two people can be talking about dramatically different concepts of, say, the Phantom of the Opera. I personally annotate all my fanfiction with the production and castmembers I have in mind – someone who only saw Elisabeth in the Dutch version, with a 100% straight Death, would be very surprised to read a story pairing up Death and Rudolf in the sensual ways inspired by the fact a certain Hungarian performer can't keep his hands to himself. Personally I find it fascinating, but sometimes you do wonder if you're speaking the same language as other fans.
Think of the differences between some shows that were re-edited for certain markets, or cinema and director's-cut versions of various films. Is Deckard an android or a blade runner? It depends on the version you watched. Now take that and multiply it by the number of productions, by the number of actors playing each role, by the number of performances. This is part of the reason that being a fan of live productions is a full-time job.
And that is all dependent on interpretation. Live performances also have different visual looks. In a way, it's freeing – forget arguing about eye colours, the same character in the same production can have three different hairstyles because three people play the role. If a mirror in someone's room is broken, this has a different message than when it's whole. You can draw much from the decorations on someone's house or the mode of his dress, but how to generalise it if you know in a different production the same character decorates and dresses as the polar opposite?
A two-way street
The other side of the single-time-point nature of media fandom is the fact it's mostly one-way. The fan interactions that end up affecting a show are rare, and we pass stories from mouth to mouth, of the fan who became a show writer, of the strange person who asked an author a question that ended up becoming a story, of the girl whose earrings got name-checked in a Pratchett novel. Out of necessity, this happens to one fan in a thousand, one fan in a million.
The nature of the live performance makes the audience a participant even if it's not a piece that asks directly for interaction. The mood of a house can affect the play more than anything; I've seen absolutely knackered and barely-breathing singers rise to new heights because they could feel the audience adored them. It's the laugh and applause, it's the holding of a breath when a complete silence falls across the stage. It's the sound of a thousand people gasping as a chandelier falls. That's where the magic is.
And there's also the fact that it's much easier to get one-on-one interaction a performer. You're not part of millions watching a movie; you're one of maybe a thousand at most people in a theatre, and if you go around the building, you'll probably find the stage door. There are ushers who'll take your flowers or gifts to the right person, even onstage during the curtain calls. If you sit in the front rows, you can get noticed when you gasp or point at things, or just have a deep enough neckline. (Or make fun of a vampire's hand gestures. Just so you know, it's bad form to make a very serious vampire giggle on stage.)
Live performances are so much more personal. This, again, makes for a dedicated fan, and an alone one – this happened to you, the person you're talking with might have no idea about it unless they saw the very same performance, were next to you at the stage door, got their items signed at the same time.
Time is fleeting
An important subset of the musicals fandom are the collectors – most fans end up having a collection at some point, of things most important to them. Being able to revisit the canon is a matter of course for media fans; for a live performance, having a tangible copy of your very experience is often a matter of mad searching, illicit smuggling of recording equipment, or exchanging materials with fans all over the world.
Yes, there are cast recordings for most successful musicals, and there is merchandise. If you are very lucky, there may even be a commercial DVD, though many productions are of the opinion that once there's a DVD, nobody will come to the play anymore. (For why this is fallacy, see above.) But this is not your experience; it's the performers being aware they are being recorded, subduing and fine-tuning their performances accordingly.
A live performance fan's canon exists chiefly in their memory, in the moment where right word was ad-libbed, the wrong person tripped, someone was impatient enough to kick someone else out of their way.
The byproduct of the urge to trap this experience in audio and video recordings is the new accessibility of live performances to people who cannot attend them. Due to prohibitions on recording for copyright reasons, the trade in these productions is underground and arcane, though they exist in a grey legal void. Most of my musicals travels in the past year and a half have been prompted by bootlegs I saw, either as full DVDs or minute-long clips on Youtube: Borchert as von Krolock, Leah Delos Santos as Belle, Uwe and Pia and Szilveszter and Mate. This expands the fandom in ways that the original performers don't expect; some of my favourite performers are Japanese, and one of the things I must see in Japan when I visit is Yuichiro Yamaguchi live on stage.
Lingua Franca
One of the things that is given, in a media fandom, is the cultural context. There are translations, but it's rare to see a translation that changes the location of the story, and it does not change the cultural coloration of the interactions between characters.
Now try that on for size with a live performance that can be set in any country that bothers to buy the license. Here, theatre might be the best bet, with Othello and Hamlet doing everything from climbing Mount Everest to corporate takeovers.
Cats is a musical that's similarly localised – the Polish production name-checked famous restaurants, and completely changed the context of Gus's most famous roles. Instead of TS Elliot's make-believe Firefrorefiddle, he recalls playing Behemoth in Master and Margarita, the fiend-cat ringmaster, the Devil's jester, the Puck of that book and play. This instantly gives him the extra dimension of tragedy in his fall, since this is dramatic greatness we're talking about, and a book beloved to many. As an encore, Growltiger is replaced by the Crimson Pirate, and we add Burt Lancaster to the play.
Even if such liberties are not taken, cultural context informs the performance. Take the difference in emphasis in the productions of Elisabeth, a musical about the life of the Empress-Queen of Austro-Hungary. In Austria, it's about the decadence of Habsburg court. In Hungary, it's about the Hungarian fight for freedom. In Germany, the coming of Nazism overshadows all. And in Japan, they take one look at the tragic figure in love with Death and the rest is so much scenery. The same musical, but four different stories, simply because of the eyes it's prepared for.
I gave you my music
From the point of view of an artist looking for inspiration, live performance is a godsend in one rather underhanded way. If I have a hole in a story in the shape of a kind, protective and reasonably intelligent young man, I can plug it with Luke Skywalker and have everyone notice, reach for Raoul as played by Steve Barton and have some people notice, or recall Lukasz Talik's Raoul and have everyone marvel at my creativity.
By watching many interpretations of the same canon, you can acquire a wide repertoire of possibilities for the same archetype or role. Will my aristocrat attend to his lace cuffs the way Yoshino Keigo does, or shall I recall the way Stanley Burleson managed to keep his straight despite the constant twitching of his hands as Richelieu?
The lessening of my creative output on this journal doesn't have much to do with musicals (rather with
fyrie ^.~ ), but what I do write these days is richer and easier because I have a deeper well of inspiration to dwell on. The immediacy of live performances and the fact the eye isn't directed has also sharpened my observation skills and made me aware of various things I can point out to my readers. I have to say I think live performance fandom has been good for me ^.^And now, I should probably write another analysis for the fascinating in-between creature that is Takarazuka fandom ;) But at 1,700+ words, this will be enough for now.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-21 12:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-21 01:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 06:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-21 05:07 pm (UTC)For one thing, in Japan media like Prince of Tennis or Bleach oftentimes gets live-action musicals
which are absolutely horrific, but that is another matterwhich then propagates out as DVDs and avi files with those people who will never see a live performance. And then there are the live seiyuu events based on a particular series and recordings as such.I still really enjoy live performances, I like how even if you see the same production more than once even with the same cast, there is different energy and intonation. I ended up seeing the original production of Into the Woods 2x and then the revival 2x as well.
I think for me, I'm more amazed at how the internet really has made things so much easier now. My cousin had to bring me back the Hungarian Les Miserables on record from a trip to Hungary. lol
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-21 05:48 pm (UTC)And indeed, for live performance fandoms, the internet is a godsend. I hear stories of people exchanging tapes at meets and with penpals - these days every Wicked performance gets taped three times over :) I mean, I've got more Japanese musicals DVDs than I have American ones!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-22 06:05 pm (UTC)Here from metafandom :)
Date: 2008-04-24 01:24 am (UTC)You already know that on the rare occasion I write musicals-based fic I don't really think of a specific performer, but other than that...YES. This is an excellent summation of why I love live theatre, and will always privilege it above film/TV (heck, even studio CDs).
One of the many many reasons I adore Pia Douwes as much as I do is that you can see her play the same role, in the same production, with the same cast three nights in a row and it's not the same performance. She's certainly not the only person this is true of, but she's the one I have experienced it with most often, largely due to the fact that I've been lucky enough to see her in more shows than I usually do. You can't get that in a fixed medium, by definition.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 04:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-27 11:24 am (UTC)Other than that, I rather agree with the subtleties that surround live performance writing. I prefer to either write down who I'm imagining in a role and/or leave enough room for other people's imagination to fill in their own version.