Bell Hooks

While reading Bell Hook's Performance Practice as a Stie of Opposition, I brought up a memory of participating a movement workshop an year ago: Exploring Choreopoem with Ntozake Shinge's play <For Colored Girls who have considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf>. In the play, the author is reflecting her own experience as a black woman in 1970s American society. Seven characters in the play, the ladies are identified only by the colors they are assigned to. Their monologues felt like the real voice of women talking about their experiences of violence and discriminations, and these interconnected stories turned into the words of struggle, resistance, empowerment and the representations of sisterhood. What I felt back then was this whole non-verbal movements combined with music makes a very organically-structured piece as a whole. After reading this paragraph about how oration and recitation of poetry originated the Black Performance, I was able to understand what I had felt at that time and why that method was called as Choreopoem. 

One thing I was wondering while reading was that Performance’s only life is in the present, and it cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations. I totally understand that sometimes the specific location itself or the time gives meanings to the performance, and the concept of Aktualität is very important in defining a live performance. However, after the COVID-19, things have been changed a lot in this industry, and people began to think about how to achieve, or even replace this defining nature of performance in a valid way. I personally agree that this might also be the results of commodification, and it is still the present time and space that matter the most when we talk about performance, but I still wonder if this would last any longer, or can change. 

As politics are often symbolized as “authority” and “power”, whereas music are often described with words like “freedom”, they seem to be placed in extremes. Ironically, however, we could think of many political figures who have used music in politics for bringing people together. I believe this is because of the accessibility music has to the public, and because certain generations share the memory of listening to certain music, and recall that time. When I listen to the song of Girls’ Generation <Into the New World>, I feel like I’m going back to the 2016 Korea when we all united. This also rely on K-pop’s unique ‘fandom’ culture, which ties its member together so strong into one big group. People are not listening to music alone anymore, but they are actively using music with shared experience as a driving force, and this also led to the participation in politics, too. I’ve also heard K-pop fans on TikTok transpired to make lots of empty spaces in Donald Trumph’s US presidents rally in Oklahoma for the political message, and how they try to participate in rightful social movements altogether as a group. Music could give a new identity to people as a group. 

cf. 

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/22/asia/k-pop-fandom-activism-intl-hnk/index.html