Victor Turner - The Anthropology of Performance

In Victor Turner's essay "The Anthropology of Performance," he argues that change involves a re-adjustment, and that this re-adjustment is ceremonial, what he sees as being theatre or performance. 

 

Turner breaks down four phases of public action:  Breach, Crisis, Redressive Action and Reintergration. For Turner, change within a culture occurs when a threshold has been crossed.  As he notes, "From the standpoint of relatively well-regulated, more or less accurately operational, methodical, orderly social life, social dramas have a 'Iiminal' or 'threshold' character. The latter term is derived from a Germanic base which means 'thrash'  'thresh,' a place where grain is beaten out from its husk, where what has been hidden is thus manifested" (92)

This passage from Turner is very similar to Roland Barthes' notion of the grain of the voice.  For Barthes, the grain of the voice, which he argues in "The Pleasure of the Text," (which happens to be the subject of my video essay) is when the voice aligns itself with the flesh or body. It is at point where meaning is shifted to the energy of the performer. It is when the body becomes the voice.   

Musicologist such as Simon Frith and Richard Middleton have tuned into Barthes' notion of the grain of the voice for its political implications in music. For example, Frith interprets Elvis Presley's body and hip shakes in his early performance on television in the 1950s disturbing and disrupting the status quo. Here, Turner's conception of performance fits well with Barthes' grain of the voice. Elvis' transgressive body language shook up the way we think of the performer and performance.

Twin Peaks

I started watching the Twin Peaks television show - can't believe I never watched this when I was in High School. I've seen almost all of Lynch's work accept for this. Lynch is great at subtly interjecting the strange, surreal, and even the supernatural into the narrative while, at the same time, balancing the realm of everyday life. 

Like the mysterious ear Jeffrey Beaumont finds in Blue Velvet, the death of Laura Palmer has disrupted the safe and peaceful rural world of Twin Peaks. What we find in Twin Peaks is bizarre entities occupying the corporeal world. But this is not like the Star Trek episode "Return to Tomorrow" where Spock and Kirk find a planet of intellectual minds stored in sphere balls and are looking for bodies to temporally occupy in order to construct artificial bodies they will soon house. 

In Twin Peaks, the spirit of Bob, (the Frank Booth of the series) is to move from body to body in order to continue his serial killer like wrath. I guess that's all I can say...because I have not finish watching the series. Twin Peaks, in many ways, reminds me of how great of a TV show Mulholland Drive could have been.