What do you get when singers, dancers and actors join forces with those who work in arts industries, including but not limited to curators, publicists, ticket takers, grant writers and critics, to put on a show with strippers, lounge lizards, lawyers, librarians, social activists and hat-check boys at the roller rink?
You get punk-indie-soul-defiant-bleeding-heart love children with large vocabularies who forsake their business suits and shake their tail feathers.
Imagine Stephen Crane‘s dream world. When he reads a poem, his horse applauds. When his horse reads a poem, Crane applauds. Horses don’t read poems, but if they did, Crane would have wanted to hear them. He was interested in fostering a place in which desire counted for more than good breeding, otherwise known as technical skill.
There was a man with tongue of wood
Who essayed to sing,
And in truth it was lamentable.
But there was one who heard
The clip-clapper of this tongue of wood
And knew what the man
Wished to sing,
And with that the singer was content.
(Poem via)
Dead at 28 at the dawn of the 20th century, Crane would have been a hell of a karaoke singer, assuming he found the right bar. He’d flourish in a karaoke free-for-all run by intellectuals but open to whoever wanders in, where the silky support the awkward and even those who live entirely in their heads get a chance to revel in the life of their body.
Karaoke night at On The Boards would have been his home away from home. Called Speak & Sing, it’s run by Eric Fredericksen, an art critic who currently serves as director of Western Bridge. Wednesday night, the crowd was a spontaneous ensemble. Pros were there, yes, real singers and dancers, trading off with soulful amateurs and those who by right of natural or cultivated talent have no business on stage.
The intensity of their desire made the poverty of their abilities an asset. Any extrovert who can carry a tune can step onto a karaoke stage and be instantly forgotten. What makes this art bar worth its weight in lost keys and broken pitches is the collective commitment from the brilliant and the dim. All were willing to take their moment and turn it inside out, sometimes at a cost. A viral strain of musical longing came from a man who opened by saying, “I’m not that interesting to watch. Please look at something else.”
Mick Jagger imitations are a karaoke staple. At Speak and Sing, somebody imitated the Senator from Minnesota imitating Mick Jagger, possibly unintentionally, adding 30 pounds and 20 years to become a more intense version of his own Seattle self.
With Fredericksen on hand to offer the solace of French philosophy, the audience/performers pushed past imitation to inhabit their own experience. Hoarse from singing (he can’t sing), Fredericksen read from Michael De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life: “The presence and circulation of a representation tells us nothing about
what it is for its users.”
(Fredericksen’s intro to a Jay Z song: “Or Jay Zed, as our English friends call him.”)
My brother once had a dog who could sing like a saxophone. On a visit and hoping for a concert, I sang a few notes shaped like a howl to get the animal in the mood. It looked at me with a detached interest that verged on pity. Part Lab and part wolf with something extra furry clinging to its chromosomes, it declined to join me. “You have to put your heart into it,” my brother said.
Do the fans at a baseball game watch themselves pitch, catch a fly and slide home? That’s not quite Fredericksen’s karaoke. In his version, stars take turns with the audience to create a new game.
The stars carry dark matter, but dark matter also carries the stars. One of the stars was SoulChilde
(Okanomode) singing early Prince better than Prince is willing to sing it now, committed as he is to the hardcore body-hating religion of his youth.
“SoulChilde looks like a sculpture,” I said to Matt Richter,
thinking of Brancusi. “We all look like sculptures,” Richter replied,
“but from different eras. I’m from the textile era.”
Another star was dancer Amy O’Neal, who slid all over everybody else and hit every hot note. What she said in this YouTube interview explains her presence:
Dance is not just being in the studio. It’s the way you
express yourself physically with your friends in the world. It’s about
the way you walk down the street, about the way you open a door,
about the way you wash your dishes, about the way you put your clothes
on in the mornings: the rituals you have in order to feel like yourself
through the day. That’s all movement, that’s all dance.
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