Lafawndah: Closing the Gap Between Artist and Audience

We often say of a powerful live show that the person giving it is a ‘natural’. But where Lafawndah is concerned, this doesn’t go far enough, and doesn’t give her enough credit. Her approach to the stage, and what happens on it, is best described as critical; she regards the whole business of performance with a certain suspicion, and refuses to take any of its conventions at face value. Again, because we like to think of a singer’s live show as to some degree spontaneous, we might imagine that this kind of critique could induce paralysis. But Lafawndah’s performative presentation at Loop - a dazzling and physically overwhelming set by an artist working at the peak of her powers, followed by an interview in which she and her band explain in detail how and why it was done - shows us a case where the literal opposite is true. 

Yasmin DuBois demonstrates that her curious attitude to the tradition she’s working in - with its unhelpful dogmas, unexamined conventions, and unlovely backstory - is a key factor in the success of her art. Her reflections on all of this ought to be encouraging and inspiring for anyone who’s ever climbed onto a stage and wondered “what am I doing here?” Or, apropos those people sitting in the dark, “what are you doing here?” Both, as Lafawndah shows, are worthwhile questions, with no easy answers. There’s always something weird about the relationship between a performer ‘up here’ and the people ‘down there’, and for an artist who thinks - and sings - as much about class, money and power as Lafawndah does, the arrangement of humans at a concert performance was bound to raise questions. 

“The way we use the space in a performance is so unidirectional”, she says. “We could be using this space!” The gestures she makes with her hands as she speaks (to say nothing of the shapes she created on stage) describe a whole galaxy of unrealised potential; a thousand points in space, a million configurations of people, sound and architecture reduced to one thing; performer on a stage, people arranged in neat rows facing the front, standing or sitting in place. 

The exceptions to this set-up only seem to prove the rule. In Jim Jarmusch’s recent documentary on The Stooges, Iggy Pop tells the story of how he invented stage-diving; describing the impulse behind it in terms very much like the ones Lafawndah has been using; wanting to traverse space, cross a divide, and do something more than create a spectacle for spectators. But stage-diving has long since become, itself, a convention, like a token or a symbol of everything we can’t do with the space of a theatre or concert hall. 

DJ Culture was meant to herald the arrival of a new, non-hierarchical performance space, in which everyone is a performer; the audience becomes the spectacle it wishes to see, rendering the usual divide meaningless - and to a large degree it still offers this. But it’s telling that when dance music genres - from disco to EDM - spit out ‘stars’ as they sometimes do, their performances quickly revert to what Lafawndah characterises as ‘the default’. Looking over the recent history of music, a familiar pattern emerges, in which artists and audiences start out exploring inventive new modes of performance or anti-performance, installations, parties, happenings and collective freak-outs, but eventually conform to the standard. “It’s not satisfying for me”, says Lafawndah, “I’m not sure it’s satisfying for the audience.” What’s missing, she goes on to explain, is the possibility of ‘exchange’ - the unidirectional nature of the standard gig, based on a straight transmission model of one sender and many receivers, seems to preclude this from the start. 

Describing what she would like to happen at a live show, she refers to a 1981 documentary film ‘Transes’, about the Morroccan folk group, Nass El-Ghiwane, in particular a scene where the band perform their chant-like music in the midst of a throng of people, dancing all over the stage, in and around the group with what looks like complete abandon. The documentary shows how occasions like this made the group a catalyst for transformation in Morocco in the seventies, not only at the level of music, but across the whole society. She aspires to something like this, situations in which singers and players become lightning rods for collective energy, and agents of real change. No wonder theatres leave her feeling unsatisfied. “There is a gap between this and that,” she says, and it’s hard to say whether her terms refer to “LA 2018” and “Morocco 1973”, or “me on stage and you in the audience” or “art and everyday life.” “I try as much as I can” she goes on, “to think about performance as a way to close the gap between that and this.” But how? 

“We abolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind… A direct communication will be re-established between the spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, from the fact that the spectator, placed in the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it.”

Written by expelled Surrealist and sometime actor Antonin Artaud in 1938, ‘The Theatre and its Double’ called for an end to the lame pantomime of European theatre, with its emphasis on text, dialogue and ‘character’, to be replaced by what he called a ‘theatre of cruelty’, in which noise, vocal expression, violent gestures, extreme sounds and lights would combine to create a theatre of total physical and psychic involvement. Artaud’s theatre, as Cobina Gillit summarises, “does not aspire to be a sequestered leisure activity detached from ‘real’ life, where an illusion of reality is enacted behind an invisible fourth wall. Instead, it refers to an event in a performance space shared by actors and audience, where truth can emerge...” Theatre, as Artuad himself wrote, “must make itself the equal of life.” Artaud was inspired to write his manifesto after a visit to the 1931 Paris International Colonial Exhibition, where - as the name suggests - European nations showed off the spoils of their considerable empires in specially designed pavilions, which purported to offer visitors a glimpse of ‘life in the colonies’. At the Dutch East Indies pavilion, Artuad watched a performance of both sacred and secular Balinese dances, accompanied by the gamelan. Here, Artuad believed he’d found both the antithesis of European theatre, and the cure for its ills. Here, he thought, was performance as ritual - an ecstatic combination of pure gesture, sound and colour. Here was his ideal; art and life, this and that, no longer separate, but whole. 

Reading Artaud’s book after hearing Lafawndah’s performance and manifesto at Loop is a curious experience. On the one hand, her show seems like the fulfilment of his prophecy - lights, costume, extreme vocal sounds and drums, drums, and more drums. On the other, separated by almost eight decades, their critiques of the state of performance proceed along similar lines and come to similar conclusions. In eighty years, not much has changed, or so it seems - though not for lack of trying. Where is magic, ritual, catharsis, connection? Why this gap between art and life, and why is it still so heavily patrolled? But while the similarities are striking, the differences are even more revealing. Context, as always is key: Artaud was a French poet and actor doing his thing as the sun was setting on what Eric Hobsbawm has defined as ‘the age of Empire’. The reason he got to see and hear Balinese gamelan in the first place is because Bali was, at the time, a colony of the Dutch East India Company, which had transported the musicians and dancers halfway across the world and installed them in a kind of living museum exhibit for the enjoyment of bored urban tourists. Artaud, like many of his generation, believed European culture was sick and degenerate, and looked beyond its borders for revival and regeneration; at which point colonialism, with its networks of trade, travel and communication, came to his rescue with fresh ideas from ‘the east’. 

Lafawndah, by contrast, is a woman of Iranian and Egyptian descent living in Paris. She was born long after France, Britain and Holland gave up their empires, but into a world that continues to deal with the consequences of their former existence. She’s an artist ‘writing back’ (as Edward Said puts it) to Western culture. “It’s not coming from a place of exoticism. I grew up listening to non-western music”, she told Dazed, “so pop music is what’s exotic to me.” As such, her view of the timeline we’ve been looking at is quite different. The inventions of Artaud, and his many acolytes, have been claimed for the history of modernism - in other words, (in Harold Rosenberg’s famous phrase) ‘the tradition of the new’. Likewise, the forms of post-war pop, which has repeatedly sought to smash up the barrier between ‘that’ and ‘this’, have been framed as a series of innovations. Lafawndah suggests another way of looking at it. “When you think of music history and you ‘de-zoom’ from Western places, and de-zoom from the past 30 years”, she says, “the function of music was so different from this.” A properly global, and more long-term view of music performance will quickly show that the Western art-music set-up - artists on stage, audience in their seats, no talking or eating during the performance please - is not the ‘tradition’ from which Artaud, Yoko Ono, Iggy Pop, Yves Tumour, Lucrecia Dalt and Lafawndah have ‘departed’ or ‘innovated’. Rather, it is itself a historical novelty which, like the middle-class lifestyle it was designed to accompany, has somehow installed itself as an eternal truth, extending endlessly into the past and the future. “The chances for an experience to be cathartic if you’re just sitting in a theatre”, says Lafawndah, describing the contours of the space with another wave of her hand, “are close to zero.”

With all this in mind, the question of ‘how to perform’ can be seen in quite a new light. When we stand on stage, if we feel awkward or alienated to some degree, if we feel a lack of communion or collective joy, a seemingly unbridgeable divide between ‘up here’ and ‘down there’, this is not entirely our fault, and not something we can easily fix with stagecraft and technique. The circumstances we deal with on the stage are the result of a historical process, a process which has taken so long, and happened so gradually, that it’s come to seem like nature. But our feeling that we could be having it better is also a clue to what’s missing in a broader sense, not just in performance, but in everyday life, and feeling ‘unnatural’ on stage - or in the audience, is probably a good thing at this point. And while we can’t make the effects of two centuries of culture and imperialism disappear just like that, we can experiment with space, explore new relationships, and subvert conventions - if only to remind ourselves and those who come to see us that our potential for collective joy is far greater than what Live Nation would have us believe; to make ourselves and others aware of new possibilities; new ways of being, listening and feeling together. And we can use language, imagery, sound, and the art of performance itself to pose the kind of questions Lafawndah does onstage; to interrogate not only the conventions of performance, but the society and culture that produced them, whose interests they ultimately serve. In this, the carefully guarded barrier between ‘this’ and ‘that’, life and art, plays a crucial role. 

Antonin Artaud - who understood neither the context of what he was watching nor the words (not ‘sounds’) the performers sang and spoke that day at the exposition - built his thesis around a highly imaginative misunderstanding of Balinese performance, and so produced what Rustom Bharucha has described as “one of the most alluring fictions of ‘oriental theatre’ that have ever been written.” But Artaud’s fantasy has, in the meantime, become a kind of artistic fact - entire strands and subgenres of art, poetry, theatre and music, from performance art to classic rock, fluxus to noise - can trace their lineage back to Artaud’s idea of what he saw that day in 1931, and to Mary Caroline Richards’ famous 1958 english translation of his book, and many attempts since then to close the gap between art and life seem to happen under the sign of ‘St Artaud’, as Susan Sontag once nicknamed him. Sontag was one of the first to record the appearance of a new form of art called ‘Happenings’ in the early 60s, which she saw as the fulfilment of Artaud’s best hopes for the stage. “Audiences”, wrote artist Allan Kaprow in 1966, “must be eliminated.” Kaprow was not, as this statement might suggest, a maniac, a terrorist or a supervillain, but a former modernist painter writing a manifesto. Nevertheless, he must have struck some people at the time as slightly unhinged. “The event seems designed to tease and abuse the audience”, wrote Sontag later that year; having attended a happening in which Kaprow first herded her and the other spectators into a small box, and then chased them out again with a lawnmower, she spoke with some authority. But the point of this was not to attack the audience per se, rather, to attack and destroy ‘the audience’ as a discrete category of people at an art event. By provoking and confusing people at happenings, Kaprow, and the form’s other pioneers, including Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneeman, hoped to blur and finally erase the line between spectators and artists.

A few months before her appearance at Loop, Lafawndah engineered a happening of her own at a show in Toronto. Some days before the gig, she met a few local people (“normal, regular… not artists!” she explains), and invited them to take part in her show - not as dancers or singers or players, but as catalysts for a small revolution. What, exactly, did she ask them to do? “I invited them to imagine,” she says. Their task, as Lafawndah explained it, was to conceive of themselves as visitors, with a mission to create contact with humans. About halfway into the show, the band stopped playing, at which point these everyday aliens appeared on stage and fanned out into the crowd, talking and gesturing to people, telling them stories, dancing and singing to them - “connecting,” as Lafawndah puts it. “It became kind of like therapy”, she goes on, “it just went really deep really quickly”. But this could only happen if the people in the crowd were prepared to give up on - or revolt against - their usual role, to abandon whatever idea they’d brought with them of what a performance would or could be like, and embrace a wider field of possibilities. In this, the audience’s first reaction was crucial. “They were like ‘did the concert stop?’ laughs bandmate and co-producer Nick Weiss. Perhaps not, but it might not be around forever, either. 

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