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• 1 2019-10-17T02:15:02-04:00 The Activism of Unbounded Stages 88 Trust & Respect in Blurring the Performer-Audience Relationship plain 2019-12-21T13:10:57-05:00

  Trust & Respect in Blurring the Performer-Audience Relationship

  Max Schaffer

  December 10th, 2019

  
  
  When I think back across all my favorite events of the HONK! Festival, I notice one common thread: the lack of a clearly defined stage. The packed corridor of Davis Plaza, the street in front of the Unitarian Church, the overpass next to the detention center in South Boston, and even an unofficial Music 25 event that tested the possibilities of HONK! as a virtual reality festival all stood out to me far more than staged events like those in Harvard Square. I think this preference roots in my general discontent with traditional bounded & raised stages, which I believe fail to create connections by forcing engagement & attention, creating imbalanced dynamics of importance, and promoting more self-conscious audience & performer behavior. Defined stages reinforce a "difference" between attendees of an event, and it's why I think they fail in community festival work. In creating unbounded performance spaces, HONK! engages in truly empathetic activism by trusting its attendees to move freely and interact without oversight--and that is a very special thing.
  Saturday in Davis Square was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had at a festival—it was open, fenceless, totally free, devoid of corporate branding, all while maintaining constant entertainment and emphasizing social action at community-scale. The beauty of Saturday (versus Sunday, which took place in Harvard Square) was the personal interaction I experienced as an attendee. For example, the scene of What Cheer? Brigade in Davis Plaza felt completely different than their performance on the Harvard Square stage. The attendees were far more involved, and audience members further back in the crowd were more inclined to interact with one another without a clear visual focus. I also witnessed people helping each other to climb up onto platforms, or walking around to the back of the plaza to take spots behind the performers and fully encircle
  them—which felt far more immersive and communal. And to expand on this, the experience I had with the New Orleans-based Young Fellaz Brass Band on stage on Sunday, compared to when they led a small parade down the block towards an empty street corner on Saturday, was vastly different. Attendees came alive to this sudden humanity that became apparent when a performer was close enough to reach out and touch them, or even talk to them or join in on the performance. I remember seeing a guitarist performing on the street; as the band walked by, they joined into the band’s performance, taking a quick solo over the brass arrangement. That level of communal interaction isn’t possible on a static, raised stage. Activist festivals feel much more activist when you are actually on the ground with performers, and not just watching—because you feel like you’re really contributing to collective joy. Even when things like crowd-chants begin, if there is a staged area holding ultimate power and focus, the chant feels directed as opposed to simply expressed. That directionality is what the unbounded stages really nail. I would liken it to my experience with HONK! bands at the Festival-affiliated detention center march, in which we, as a group, were both the performer of the vocalizations as well as (in many ways) the audience for them.
  
  Coming back to this idea of "closeness to performers," trusting an audience to be within arms' reach of you also creates a more intimate environment where people feel their collective humanity is being respected. It makes the prospect of joining in on the pickup band HONK! organizer Ken Field leads each year far less anxiety inducing, since you can just hop into the back row and then dissolve back into the crowd. And on the opposite side, it allows for audience members to become the spectacle of a performance without necessarily “performing”--an almost impossible concept in the context of stage-bounded performances. I personally recall a woman dancing with a small child to the pickup band that almost became like a public dance performance, as well as a stilt-walker rolling through the crowd and just picking up the donation bucket from someone to take around with them. The level of trust that goes along with allowing real fluidity between audience, organizer, and performer is what makes Honk! particularly special.
  
  What these kinds of unbounded events teach us is that being attentive to performers, and being respectful of them, is not necessarily the same thing in public festivals. In my experience, people felt completely fine dropping in and out of different performances, talking to their friends, dancing—just doing whatever—because there was a common understanding of thankfulness and respect for the musicians who were providing both entertainment and the opportunity to gather. Plus, the organizers of the festival make a point to be mostly invisible. After an opening address, it’s actually hard to find any “staff” aside from some volunteers at booths, which contributes to the perception that the Festival is very much community run and not overseen by anyone other than bands and attendees. There is a semblance of organization in the planning of bands and performance areas, but beyond that, very little restraint aside from what attendees give without instruction. The amount of trust that goes into this lack of direct instruction is what makes festivals like HONK! feel intimate and actually communal. To expand on that concept of trust: importantly, there was not a cop to be seen within a wide radius of Davis Square on Saturday, only a couple EMTs—which translates this trust to the crowd while also acknowledging that the presence of police inherently makes a festival less accessible to many people. Comparatively, Harvard Square was full of police which to me put a feeling of surveillance, fear, and distrust into the event. It makes such a massive difference to cede some level of safety and control in order to show attendees trust & respect.
  
  It is critical to understand that having stages on ground-level (rather than raised) is not the same as sanctioning an unbounded stage. What makes a brass festival particularly great for this is the lack of amplification, which means no wires or speakers to cordon off performers from the audience. Interestingly, I continued to think about "unboundness" of space when our class attended a test-event that asked how the logistics, socializations, and norms that drive music festivals would change if HONK! took place in virtual space. Watching organizer Ken Field on saxophone as a stand-in for HONK!--his performance streamed live to our classroom and experienced through headsets as a music festival "in outer space"--I thought about how virtual reality shares this unbounded “wireless” concept, because there are no speaker or cable elements needed inside the digital space. All of this allows for more fluidity & access in planning & mobility, which contributes to the organic and very human feelings of the events. One conflict I can't quite reckon with, though, is that of access & mobility: while it is far more accessible for performers with limited mobility to access unbounded & non-raised stages (like those on Saturday in Davis Square), it is likely more difficult for audience members past the front row to see performers when they utilize wheelchairs, cannot stand for long periods, or are not as tall as someone further ahead of them in the crowd. In some senses, VR gets around this by negating the need to stand, or even to be at the event itself—but it creates other divides in accessibility given the necessary technology and know-how required to use it. Because of this, I still see HONK!’s Saturday edition as the most accessible form of the festival.
  
  
  
  Ever since attending, I've tried to figure out what exactly about Honk! made me feel so warm and fuzzy. And while I do believe the root of this lies in the lack of boundaries in terms of both scope and staging, the real core of this feeling seems to be: trust. I felt trusted as both an attendee and as a human, and I therefore extended my own trust to those around me. I realize this may sound overly sensitive, but I do think it's critical to recognize the intense empathy-driven activism present in removing bounded stages. Everything about HONK! is non-hierarchical--from it's planning team, to its event volunteers, to its performers, to its audience members. There are no rigid definitions, and the event reflects this. When you put trust in your community to support each other, festivals flourish, and that is the best lesson I learned from experiencing HONK! 2019.
• 1 2019-11-19T02:06:51-05:00 HONK! and Other Music Festivals: The Early Utopia 14 Written By Drew Tucker plain 2019-12-21T17:36:44-05:00
  
  For the past three months, our "Music 25: Music Festivals" class has tried to answer the simple question: “What is a music festival?” I thought that this would be a no-brainer meant to shape conversations about other issues, but to my surprise it ended up being one of the most incredibly difficult terms to define. And, why? Because music festivals comprise such a wide range of events with differing functions that people often fail to consider the full range of factors that serve as integral contributors to the actual experience of each festival. Through Music 25's active engagement with the HONK! Festival--a street band movement focused on reclaiming spaces for expression, activism, and community--I came to agree with the authenticity of its purpose as listed on their website: “At full power, these bands create an irresistible spectacle of creative movement and sonic self-expression directed at making the world a better place.” Contrasting the intent (and outcomes) of the HONK! Festival with that of other current music festivals has helped me define what a music festival is, as well as shaped my ideas about prescriptive measures to reorganize festivals that fall short of providing the same authentic experience as HONK! 
  
  Music festivals have long been cultural hubs where ideas, love, empathy, and expression are championed. In this conjunction of feeling, visceral emotion, and dialogue in the moment of performance, we see the inspiration and uplift of all both performers and audience. In the most basic sense, music festivals have the power to be the arena for activism, for the unification of communities, and for the creation of--dare I say it--utopias. We see, for example, that HONK! actively facilitates an incredibly diverse environment where people of all colors come together in a day of unity. However, many contemporaneous popular music festivals makes similar claims for atavistic intentions, but are quickly exposed for the profit hungry, commercialized institutions that they truly are. In the Guardian article, “The Kids Are All White: Can US Festivals Live Up to Their “Post-racial’ Promise?,” author Jemayel Khawaja gives the reader insight into the organizational structure of massive popular music festivals. Though the trope of US music festivals as multicultural utopias facilitating equality is ubiquitous in media and advertising, the data suggests that white people can comprise up to roughly 70% of the festival audience, as it did in 2016 at Coachella. 
  
  With contradictory historical precedent vs, emerging capitalist agendas of many popular music festivals, I write this commentary to remind readers of the power of the music festival. I offer a new definition of "music festival" that is predicated upon the belief that these events should enact a few main tenants. 1) Music festivals should take some kind of activist approach to bring about either political or social change. 2) Festivals and their organizers should make an effort to bridge the gaps in their representative community. 3) That community should consist of a diverse set of people through ideology, culture, race, or identity. 4) Music must either be the instrument or main facilitator through which these tenants are carried out. I give this definition, not out of a need for technicalities, but in order to raise the expectations that the broad category of "music festivals" should draw on the power of artistry and performance to create visceral and empathetic connections between music, performers, and listeners. In my experience, the most popular music festivals exist simply as  spectacles where tickets get sold to the highest bidder, and “fans” fail to recognize the lessons, the teachings, and consequently the importance and power of the music presented to them. I argue that music festivals have not simply the power, but the responsibility to shape these events into performances that have a message, that stand for something. I believe that this message is best encapsulated by the following image of a banner present at HONK! 2019. 
  
  
  Rude Mechanical Orchestra performs in Kenney Park during the HONK! Festival on Saturday, October 12th 2019 at 3pm.
  
  So why might this be? Why aren’t the claims of the popular music festivals "authentic"? Jemayel, in my opinion, perfectly sums the issue when he claims: “Therein lies the reason for the glaring dissonance between the intent and effect of the festival industry’s push for diversity: those in executive position, from the record label to the management to the promoters to the corporate sponsors, are usually caucasian.” While having caucasian promoters and management isn't inherently wrong, the main critique I am trying to highlight is a lack of the diversity in festival leadership. The mismatch between so-called mission statements and the facilitators who enact them is one reason the intended objective of so many music festivals to be an oasis of equality never comes to pass. I argue that it is necessary for the leadership of these festivals to actively ensure that the correct structural factors are in place to allow for activism and community building. HONK! has risen to the challenge. In my interview with Kevin Leppmann, one of the original founders of the HONK! Festival, puts it like this: 
  
  “So, the festival, as I say, if it's just to the extent to which it's a success, it has provided as a space and a forum where individually and collectively people can realize all kinds of creative possibilities and particularly surprising, spontaneous possibilities. And that in turn, as it turns out, and this is kind of the flip side of what I learned. What I think a lot of us learned organizing the festival, that it isn't so much that you need to orchestrate new ideas or intuitions. You need to remove a lot of other obstacles that modern society puts in the way of having this kind of collective imagination and expression that in fact. Given the opportunity and once you remove those other barriers, there is a natural inclination for people to sing and dance and laugh and play and love one another.” 
  
  
  When leaders such as Kevin Leppmann actually do challenge the societal boundaries that exist between communities, the entire structure of the festival then revolves around breaking them down. The creation of a communal environment cannot be passive, though it will often take a back seat to spectacle if allowed to do so. 
  
  In conclusion, I hope that this commentary opens the reader’s eyes to the potential of what music festivals--across genre, across audiences, across spaces and places--could stand for. I hope that it aptly recognizes the HONK! Festival for the community, activism, and structural change that it and its organizers strive to create. I hope that it implores the reader to ask more from other festivals and their creators, and to demand an authentic music festival experience rather than this hollow shell of a festival we currently see today.