BWW Blog: Cheyenne Dalton - The Theatricality of Concerts

Very recently, I drove from Auburn to Atlanta to see one of my favorite bands at The Tabernacle - Two Door Cinema Club - and not only did I end up falling in love with them even more, but I also fell in love with Jack Garratt, who was opening for them. My friend Josh and I went together, because neither of us know anybody in Auburn who likes the same music we do - but I ended up seeing my friend and fellow Sound Designer, Carl, there also!

The Tabernacle was an incredible venue. While we were standing around (watching Jack's sound technician set up his equipment), a girl near us told me that it used to be a church, indicated by the organ pipes behind the stage. The seats on the floor had been cleared out, but the balcony level remained intact and many people were seated above us. There's just something theatrical about being on the orchestra level during a show that's so appealing to me - even if I have to stand. I was checking out their technical set-up long before Carl showed up, but when he came to stand with us, we truly dissected what we were seeing. We ooh-ed and ahh-ed at the line arrays, the seven LED screens, the truss completely filled with stage lighting, and the sweet men who were setting up and sound-checking. (I was upset at the lack of women working in this venue, but that's another post for another time.) Jack Garratt was so ingenious - he knew his equipment and the extent to what he could use them. He was truly a one-man-band. His set up included his keys, drum kit, and guitar, as well as the odd noisemaker to hit. And he played them all at the same time, adding loops and loops and more loops. Two Door Cinema Club is a fully-fledged band, however, but they really knew how to work the stage.

I'm currently taking a literature and theory seminar at Auburn on performance art - and the biggest takeaway that I've discovered so far this semester is that everything has the ability to be a performance. Which seems obvious, right? Because it's true: performance is not limited to what is happening on a stage. But in this case, it is onstage. These people are performing for us - whether they think of it as a performance or not. And not only can anything be a performance, but anything can be performative. The audience, the sound guys (I generalize guys because I didn't see a single woman in the venue that wasn't a concert-goer like myself), the photographers, everyone - we're performing. The audience has choices to make: do I sing along, do I jump around, do I dance, what? And whatever choice is made is performative.

I get a weird thought when I get lost in the ideas of performances and performative nature, mainly because I'm a technician and a designer and I have no desire to be seen onstage and I have no desire to perform. But in my job, on a day-to-day basis, I perform in some way. Just as I performed at the concert by singing and dancing and laughing, I perform in the way that I present myself while I'm working. Performing isn't limited, and it certainly is hard to define and categorize. But it's a little exciting to know that I can perform in my own way without having to be looked at.

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