English 766

Dr. Kenneth Sherwood

26 October 2005

Sherwood Demonstrates What Bauman Means

Upon reading “Elaborative Versioning’s: Characteristics of Emergent Performance in Three Print/Oral/Aural Poets” by Kenneth Sherwood, I thought: Dr. Sherwood is showing us exactly what Richard Bauman means when he talks about “versionings” and “emergent performances” in his book, “Verbal Art As Performance.”

In his book, Bauman constructs the “framework for performance-centered

approach to verbal art” (2). He starts from the position of the folklorist but draws from a wide range of disciplines, chiefly anthropology, linguistics, and criticism.

In Chapter 5 of his book, Bauman says, “The concept of emergence is necessary to the study of performance as a means toward comprehending the uniqueness of particular performances as a generalized cultural system in a community (37). In his essay, Dr. Sherwood uses this concept to explain the what some critics and scholars would call the out-of-the-ordinary oral performances of poets Amiri Baraka, an African American; Kamau Brathwaite, a native of Bridgetown, Barbados; and Chilean-born Cecilia Vicuna.

As Bauman notes, “The emergent quality of performance resides in the interplay between communicative resources, individual competence, and the goal of the participants, within the context of particular situations. In the case of Baraka, Vicuna and Braithwaite, they are all well-established and published poets and all three used, for lack of a better term out-of-the-ordinary methods in their oral performances. For example, in describing Baraka’s performance of his poem, “Funk Lore,” Dr. Sherwood wrote:

With the announcement of the title – framing gesture – Baraka

introduces the poem in a strong voice. The pace and tone with

which the next lines are delivered give them the feel of an

improvisation, perhaps even an aside. This quickly, quietly

delivered historical catalogue of the misrepresentations and

appropriations of African American music forms is marked with

the modulations of such paralinguistic features as rate, pause,

pitch, tone, loudness and stress (10).

As Dr. Sherwood notes, “Baraka’s approach to the occasion reflects what Bauman identifies as a central element of true performance – an emergent dimension” (11). “As an emergent event, the performance must be dynamic, in flux at some level,” Dr. Sherwood adds (11). He used another example to show how Vicuna’s performance falls into the emergent performance venue. He wrote:

Recognized as an installation artist as well as poet, Vicuna

frequently prepares the site for a poetry performance in

advance by weaving thread throughout a space. Her Texas

performance began with the silent screening of her video

featuring dancers weaving on a Hudson River pier at twilight.

As the video closed, Vicuna began singing from her seat

at the rear of the audience. Rising, she slowly moved to the

podium, still singing and using a hand-held light to cast

thread-like lines upon the walls, ceiling and audience (13).

To fit the mould of an emergent performance the actual performance usually varies in some kind of unusual way from the way it would seem to be carried just by an ordinary reading of the text. “The point is that completely novel and completely fixed texts represent the poles of an ideal continuum, and that between the poles lies the range of emergent text structures to be found in empirical performance,” says Bauman (40). Using quotes from the book or magazine Song Poem, Dr. Sherwood used yet another example to show how Brathwaite’s performance of his poem “Angel/Engine” meets the emerging performance criteria:

(It) opens itself up to dance, drumming, and the interactive

space of ritual. The poem loosely narrates a woman’s

spiritual possession by Shango, whom she explain is the

‘‘Yoruba and Black New World god of lighting and thunder;”

Shango is also closely related to Ogun, his complement “in the

‘destructive creative principle’…One of their (technological)

apotheoses is the train. The jazz rhythms of John Coltrane…

and the forward gospel impetus of Aretha Franklin are other

aspects of this” (20)

I think Dr. Sherwood’s examples and illustrations are demonstrated well and Bauman’s concept of emergent performance will be useful when I write my long paper for this class. Also, both writers articulated well the need for literary critics to take more notes on the concept of emergent peformancee as the field of ethnopoetics continue to blossom.