I found myself feeling slightly shamed to be clapping so hard and enthusiastically at the finish of Valeria Giuga’s clever and thoughtful dance performance Rockstar at Atelier de Paris/CDCN. Around me, too many fellow spectators showed off that peculiar form of un-enthusiasm that signals disapproval rather than, say, disappointment.
The mechanics of Rockstar work well.
It has all it takes and not too much of it, either. Rockstar is easy to enjoy.
The Rockstar scenario, its light, music and choreography all roll out smoothly.
An amorphous musical frame doubled by a soft-light visual frame supports a heavy-duty weft and warp of three danced all-time hit-parade toppers: Papa Was a Rolling Stone (The Temptations, 1972), Personal Jesus (Depeche Mode, 1989) and Fame (David Bowie, 1975). Giuga consistently creates an atmosphere that is playful and not-quite distracting, not-quite hypnotic …
Come to think of it, her creation manages to evoke an emotional something very much like what rockstars create, at least the ones I’ve seen on TV…
Finally, a professional in full possession, Valeria Giuga dances supremely well. If her choreography got me thinking “rockstar”, her personal style got me feeling Peter Robert Auty’s version of “Walking in the Air”.
We’re floating in the moonlit sky/… I’m finding I can fly so high above with you/…
Suddenly, swooping low, on ocean deep/Rousing up a mighty monster from his sleep!
Resentfully, I redoubled my enthusiasm.
It happens to me often enough that I don’t appreciate what those around me seem to. Also, like other people, often enough I can’t say why I can’t appreciate a perfectly well-constructed piece.
The point of live work, after all, is that it’s fully and directly relational: feeling and sense before, during and after performance count. Like psychoanalysis, the underlying scenario of live performance is Life, capital L.
Sullenly mulling the contrast between my enthusiasm and other spectators’ un-enthusiasm got me associating that, when I was a little boy, I also used to feel shamed that neither of my grandfathers had gone asoldiering.
Feeling shamed is a fact, a natural fact, like fun.
A sculptor told me with a straight face he did wood because there warn’t no metal on Tobacco Road. He then threw back his glass of sparkling wine, with feeling.
I was born on Airstrip One. There shame and honor reigns. Going for a soldier was – to echo the Barry Goldwater slogan – a duty, not a choice. In those “post-war” days – before active shooter drills – cringed under my school desk, my cowardly trembling as I breathed hot and quick the air of Victory, Fire, Ash and Dust of the second world war shamed me too.
Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Mrs. Needoh, the fourth-grade teacher, worried aloud whether the nearby VulcanizedÒ rubber factories had adequate ack-ack. Feu my brother was shamed for telling me, That woman is crazy. Was he shamed because he spoke out of turn, said the shaming phrase to littler boys, called Mrs. Needoh that woman or called Mrs. Needoh crazy? Yes, obvious, chastisement, inevitable.
Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
On Airstrip One, as victory is ashes, as success is just darn successful, time is as a seamless garment.
Seamlessness makes the present appear an obvious inevitability – shaming them as might not see it right off.
Like lubricious Lenina’s zipless overalls, on the brave new world of Airstrip One, seamlessness facilitates successful pneumatics, whether worked on you or by you. Either way, it’s shameful to say.
Shame is as shame does. Seamlessness facilitates natural doublefeel by creating the past as just another unconscious space in which to displace the inconvenient part of mixed emotions.
Mixed emotions are also a fact, a natural fact. Seamlessly joined with the present as Eve to Adam’s rib, on Airstrip One the Past is that damned spot on a favorite dress concealing the ecstasy of unexpected love in a fog of anguished expostulation.
The glow of the Past is the waste heat of contradictory emotions, the product of doublefeel, feeling one thing while knowing everyone else’s feeling, one’s own racially-healthy feeling, must be true.
How can one personal feeling be so much at odds with obvious, inevitable Airstrip One?
What was that unnameable natural fact that kept my grandfathers – limber, stiff, generous, miserly, gruff, bluff, suspect, upright malchiks – from bounden duty on the Malabar front?
So was it that I felt shamed as I clapped hard for Rockstar; I was not of them but must feel with them even now that that I no longer have the energy for it. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
The point is that Rockstar doesn’t rockstar as it must. That’s where the un-enthusiasm comes from.
Rockstar (plural rockstars)
- A member of a rock band, or a solo artist in the genre, especially one with celebrity
- (figuratively sometimes used attributively) A person who is renowned or revered in his or her field of accomplishment.
- (figuratively sometimes used attributively) Any animal, plant, or other thing that is renowned amongst others of its type.
"Owls are the rockstars of the bird world". - Wiktionary
Good show it may be but Rockstar does not feel “rockstar”, as a fixed term, an icon of canonical parts. Indeed, until that moment of shame and un-enthusiasm, I wonder if anyone had thought that this natural facts of the 60s had canonical parts.
Try these citations for rough analysis of what I mean:
“Rockstar”
- A member of a rock band, or a solo artist in the genre, especially one with celebrity status : Papa Was a Rolling Stone ’s most salient line is “… and when he died, all he left us was alone”.
- A person who is renowned or revered in his or her field of accomplishment : Personal Jesus hints at, among other unsavory stuff, commercialized dependency with, “Lift the receiver/ will make you a believer/ reach and touch faith”.
- Any animal, plant, or other thing that is renownedamongst others of its type: Fame brings together you and he, megalomania and nowhere: “Fame, makes a man take things over/ Fame, lets him loose, hard to swallow /Fame, puts you there where things are hollow”.
"Vultures are the rockstars of the bird world."
Freddie Mercury? Mick Jagger? Cher? Patti Smith?
Maybe I and my fellow spectators discovered the dissonance all together and all at once, I feeling shame and they feeling sour. I can’t know.
What I can say is that Rockstar raised in me an interesting past and many interesting feelings that make it; it did that for my fellow spectators as well: Oceania has never been at war with Eurasia? Is that good? Or bad? And how is it?
For me, that’s certainly art or part of it. For that matter, so is my feeing shamed.
Remember that Australian bush hunter in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park?
Just before that frighteningly intelligent velociraptor rips him to hamburger, he admiringly grunts “Attagirl!”
Attagirl! Valeria.
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