illusions

A few years ago in a documentary about his life the famous pianist and conductor, Daniel Barenboim,  who currently serves as the Music Director of the Berlin State Opera, jokingly said, “You know as a child I thought everyone played the piano.” Barenboim was speaking of his childhood, his father who had been a pianist and his only teacher, and how their home had always been filled with the sound of piano lessons. “It wasn’t until much later, after I had left my parents, that I realized that it wasn’t so.”
    Reading the articles I felt somewhat the same. I have lived my life within the constructs of art. Particularly the performing arts. I worked professionally as a singer, dancer, actress, and director, for over ten years and  have been teaching for twenty six. Art is all about experience and interpretation. In fact there is little else. In art experience and interpretations come together to create an illusion of truth, within which, with any luck, there is a grain of universal meaning that can touch someone emotionally, provoke someone intellectually, or illuminate the brain and the heart.
    To explain what I mean I will use the example of a play. The text of the play, even if it is based on a collection of “actual” facts ( if I understood Joan W. Scott correctly, then that would be what she calls “foundations”) is an interpretation of the playwright, i.e the events as seen through the playwrights experience. The events exposed through  the playwrights questions. The production in its entirety is the product of the director’s interpretation and musings. The set, costumes, and props are interpretations of the artist designing them. The actors and actresses use their multiple  interpretations and experiences to make their bodies and voices become, almost, someone else. As all these artists continue to work together during rehearsals their interaction changes the interpretation of the text itself, the way the actors see themselves, and the way they play their part. Finally, the audience, with it’s multiple identities and experiences, brings its own energies to the performance and takes away its own interpretation..
    Classical music (and I am including in that contemporary classical music) does the same. Music is more abstract than theater. The composer is interpreting events, emotion, and thoughts into the abstract language of notes. These notes, the “facts”, though, are rarely performed by the composer. Instead, the audience will hear the work only through the rendition of a musician, which inevitable includes the musicians view point made up of endless past and present impressions. Here to, in a live performance, the audience and the venue, with it’s specific atmosphere, will have an affect on what will take place. Each performance is therefor unique and fluid. It is why a live performance compared with a recording is such a special event.
    The American composer John Cage took this to idea to the extreme when he had a pianist sit down on stage at a grand piano in silence for four minutes. The “piece” was the moment in space as “performed” by all the individuals in the room. Their coughing, clearing of the throat, shuffling in the chair, and the crackling noise of someone unwrapping a candy.
    Perhaps because historians and geographers and many other scholars in academic fields seem to have convinced themselves that they are working with axioms, facts, and  premises in an attempt to forge a truth and convince their colleagues and the rest of the world that their truth is real, unlike the illusion artists know they are creating, they are more inclined to forget that the total of their experience is shaping their thought processes and conclusions.
    For years our school books taught us that dinosaurs are cold blooded until one day dinosaurs remnants were found that showed a possibility of a heart with four chambers. So dinosaurs had hair after all? Even after this revolutionary find many Paleontologist could not accept the idea. I also keep thinking of the philosopher Kant whose moral imperatives all seem to have come in to being to prove/defend the a-priori existence of God.
    Artist, also cannot and could never completely adopt what Linda McDowel calls the “unmarked disembodied ideal that was/is socially valued within academia.”  The body is intensely involved in the making of most art. Even for the playwright and the composer. The writer has to imagine his characters as real people. The composer  has to deal with real instruments played by real musicians. This is not to say that they haven’t tried, but, in the end, art is a three dimensional experience that cannot exclude the body. The audience experience of art is, I’d like to say should be, visceral as well.
    Maybe it’s not really art. Maybe it’s just the way I perceive the practice of art, or the way I practice it that made me wonder if Faranak Miraftab experience in Mexico would have been different if she was an actress, or a writer (non academic). Would she have been less surprised by the Mexican women’s reaction to her being an exiled thirty five year old Muslim from Iran without children? Would she have blamed the Mexican women’s assumption on a movie “reflecting a Western media’s political agenda” when in fact she writes that “going home” would be fatally risky”? Would she have been less ruffled to have her “real” value system including education, academic position, travel, non- motherhood, questioned?  I don’t know. Maybe.