Bards and buggy whips?
Submitted by shava on Fri, 02/05/2010 - 2:58pm
Will electronic media kill what the book buried?
Before we had the book, we had the bard, the minstrel, the storyteller. In the dark evenings, we hungered for them to be singing, chanting, reciting from memory, improvising a tale. The storyteller put his or her full body and spirit into portrayal, owning a room and whatever numbers there, directing the breath and heartbeat and emotion of those present -- those compelled to presence in a sacred moment.
No matter how engaging a book, it will never be as communal and magical as a storyteller's art. The most amazing theatrical production barely rivals its immediacy. A movie may bring you to the edge of your seat or make you laugh then cry -- but this is the apex of cinematic craft, not its ordinary expression.
Today, the aesthetic of good-enough media makes the MP3 virtuously convenient and makes faithful recording (or live music!) less than necessary. Free media (whether through a download that deprives the artist of a living, or through a download that is given away) makes the leap from free to "paying for art" steep.
What the idea of the "long tail" seems to exclude is the idea that live performance can rarely compete with "good enough" recordings -- even more so, with performance that doesn't record well. Magicians, storytellers, mimes don't translate to electrons well. And if they don't translate to electrons well, then no one will include them in the online categories, and young people will not look for them.
The book reduced our yearning for live storytelling. But electronic media may well kill it.
Shava Nerad is licensed by the Cambridge Arts Council as a storyteller for street performance
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1 response to "Bards and buggy whips?"
1. Don't mourn performance just yet
I'm not ready to declare the death of performance just yet. In music in particular the end of mass sales of recordings is likely to lead to a new emphasis on performances. It won't be records that make bands money--a lot of them will give away recordings of their songs for free--it'll be concerts, small club shows and mass stadium spectacles--that people pay for.
I think it's arguable too that most social media emphasizes presence and performance, as long as "presence" means more than just physically in the same room. (Which isn't what's really important with the storyteller, is it? It isn't the fact that Homer's in the room with you. It's that Achilles is.)
Electronic media might just *save* performance. :-)