Tag Archives: performance

The Queen’s Feast

Context

The informant is a freshman at USC from Barrington, Illinois. During a call, I recorded an interview with them about rituals, superstitions, and festivals. When asked if they perform at any festivals, this is what they performed. Important context to know is that they would be part of the “Bristol Busking Frolic” performance troop that would perform at the Bristol Renaissance Faire in Kenosha, Wisconsin over multiple years.

Text

PL: I’m going to tell you about Queen’s Feast at the Bristol Renaissance Fair in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Okay, so every day at the Renaissance Fair, which is in the summer, and stuff. So the whole–one of the–one of the big concepts from the Renaissance Fair is that it’s a day in 1574 in Bristol, England. And Queen Elizabeth the first is visiting, you know, like you do. Yeah. And so there’s the whole thing is like, “Whoa, we’re going to see the queen.” So I’m part of a cast called the Bristol Busking Frolic. BBF, for sure.

PL: And every day at, I believe, like, two–I think it’s two, I think it’s two, I’m gonna go with two. I don’t remember somewhere in like the early afternoon, or noonish.

PL: We, as a cast will all meet beforehand and plan a couple of things for the Queen’s Feast. And the Queen’s Feast is a thing that is primarily the court cast does–the cast–to please the Court.

PL: And so queen will sit at a table. And she will have like the mayor and like her ladies next to her. And then they will be presented with food. And that’s literally their lunch. Like they eat as a performance. And there’s chairs and there’s benches set up around to like watch and like hang out. And then there’s a little carpeted area where you–during the day, like, the Court will do like court dances and stuff like that.

PL: And the Queen, so she’s eating lunch or whatever. And we the Bristol Busking Frolic will show up, and we will each day usually sing two songs and do one mum, which is a story or skit sort of thing. And sometimes that’ll be shaken up because like sometimes someone might want to like share, like, something they’re learning or like a thing or like a solo on the flute that they learned. But usually, we will do two songs and a mum and there’s a set, there’s set songs we do. They’re like folk songs and stuff. There is a lot about boats. One about drinking, you know, classic folk song stuff. And then we’ll tell mums which are often based on or feature a folktale.

Interviewer: What is the structure of a mum? How is it different from a folktale?

PL: It’s–okay, so it’s usually one person will tell the story and there’ll be like the narrator. And then a couple of other people will play the characters in the story. And we’ll have brief lines, but mostly it’ll be like, “And then the sausage said, I’m a sausage!” and it’s like, hahaha. They’re usually funny. They’re funny stories. They’re short.

PL: And any one person narrates it, and they know the story. And they and everyone else either sits to the side or they’re players in the story and they’ll have honestly, there aren’t really costumes but a lot of times there’s small props.

PL: Like a donkey’s mask–we have we have a mask with a donkey on it. Anyways, yeah. And, and they’ll act out the scene, and the story and they’re funny and it’s like, whoa, ha, ha, ha. And then we all bow. And at the end, at the end of our performance, after we’ve seen–we’ve sung one song, and then we do them and then we sing another song, The Queen will be like, thank you so much. And we will all like skittishly gather around and like bow. Actually, we don’t bow. That’s the big thing. Bowing isn’t a thing, you révérence, which is where you take one foot behind the other and lean back on that back foot and keep your forward leg straight. Actually, that’s the male reference. The female reference is basically just a curtsy.

PL: Whole thing with like, maintaining eye contact or something. I don’t know. Anyway, different thing. But we’ll we’ll we’ll révérence and she’ll be like, thank you so much. And then here’s this tradition. She gives us grapes. Oh, it’s weird. I don’t know why. But traditionally, she throws grapes to us and we try to catch them and we’re like, “Oh, the grapes from the queen!”

Analysis

This performance is a key part of the Renaissance faire; as the informant describes, it is the main part of the each day. The “queen” is supposed to be Queen Elizabeth the First of England, but her performance is less of a historically accurate depiction of the historical queen, but rather a representation of a homogenized ideal of the time period in question. The performance harkens to “tradition,” but it demonstrates that “tradition” itself is more of a contemporary performance referencing the past rather than an accurate depiction of it. It is not certain whether the act of throwing grapes was ever something that Queen Elizabeth I did, but it is part of this performance because of its mix of entertainment value and “Renaissance” aesthetic.

Certain aspects of the historical time period hold over in this performance: of course, the clothes are meant to represent this time period regardless of whether they are perfectly accurate, but gestures such as the révérence seem to have actually been practiced in that period. The révérance might be the easiest part of emulating the Renaissance time period as performance, as it is simply a specific movement of the body. However, it is not certain whether this act was performed in the same context as the performers sought to emulate. It is instead meant to signal historical performance to the paying audience.

Musical Theater Pre-Show Ritual: Linking Pinkies and Biting Your Thumb

Text:

MA: “A pre-show ritual we would do at my high school, if you were sticking your thumb and your pinky out, you would link your pinky with someone else’s and then bite your thumbs in front of each other’s faces. It’s kind of like a kiss, but you’re not actually kissing.”

Context:

The informant is a 20-year-old college student from Orange County, California, who did musical theater throughout her childhood and attended a performing arts high school. She and her castmates in high school would do this ritual before the beginning of a performance. MA described how the gesture allowed performers to be calm in the high anxiety moments before a show. The intimacy of this act, which she compared to a kiss since “you’re literally a hand’s length away from each other’s faces,” fosters a sense camaraderie between members of a cast which can boost performers’ confidence.

Analysis:

This ritual, like many if not all pre-show rituals, evokes a sense of solidarity between performers. Because performers spend so much time together rehearsing, members of a cast tend to bond with each other. This is important since live theater relies on each individual’s performance as well as the interactions between performers, so fostering a sense of community promotes the success of the actors and of the show. The medium demands vulnerability from performers, who must put themselves on display and maintain their dramatic personas while fielding the immediate, unfiltered reactions of the audience. Thus, a show’s success relies on the cast’s ability to trust one another. This intimate musical theater ritual both reflects and promotes the closeness of the cast, conveying that the performers’ trust and believe in each other. This sense of support and community can build confidence and lessen stress, enabling better performance. It can also be interpreted as a good luck ritual or even a superstition.

“Toi Toi Toi” – Folk Speech for Performing Artists

Context:

Informant AT was a current undergraduate student at The University of Southern California pursuing their BFA in Dance at the time of this collection. AT has been training in multiple dance genres since they were young. Dancing has allowed AT to travel around the world where they have had the opportunity to perform for and learn from many different dance artists.

When speaking with AT, they described a folk speech they heard while in Europe that was said to AT and other dancers just before a performance.

Text:

“Toi toi toi”

This folk speech is similar to saying “break a leg” in that it means “good luck” and/or “have a great show.” AT mentioned that this can be said verbally or written in a card, but they have only ever heard/seen it while performing in European countries, not the United States.

Analysis:

After hearing about this from AT, believe that this particular folk speech functions to direct well wishes to performers without explicitly saying it. Wishing someone “good luck” explicitly is believed to have the opposite effect. Since performers are usually faced with anxieties or “stage fright” before performing, there became a need for a different way of expressing one’s well-intended wishes. This folk speech meets this need while simultaneously creating “insiders” (the performers) and “outsiders” (non-performers). If an outsider were to hear this folk speech it wouldn’t have any significance and might even puzzle them. As a performer, you learn and adopt the customs and sayings of other performers that you come into contact with. This allows for the transfer of the unofficial knowledge/meaning of “toi toi toi.”

Annotation:

This folk speech is similar to another that can be found in the USC Folklore Archive. See this variation here:

Keeney, Samuel, and Samuel Keeney. “University of Southern California.” USC Digital Folklore Archives, 17 May 2020, folklore.usc.edu/saying-merde-instead-of-break-a-leg-for-ballet/.

Pre-Choir Performance Ritual

Main Piece:

Interviewer: You’re in choir, right?

Informant: Uh huh.

Interviewer: Is there any kind of rituals you guys do. Like anything before you guys start?

Informant: Well, one of our teachers, right before we are about to go into a concert, she’ll have us sit in a room and turn off the lights. Then she’ll close the blinds so we are sitting in a dark room. She has us sit criss cross applesauce and close our eyes and doing breathing things. And then she has us think of different places or different things, like, think you’re at the beach and you hear the waves and how at first they are very soft. Then the waves crash, then they go back to soft. Then she compares that to our voices. Then she goes, like, wind on the tall grass or in the trees or something and how you can hear it. But it wasn’t like one thing was way louder than anything else. It was like it all blended together. That’s how she had us get ready for a concert, so we had a calm mindset. We also had, like, a synchronous mindset, where we are all in beat with one another. But it wasn’t like a stressful, like we have to be in beat. It’s like a ‘can we be like nature,’ where we all move together’. And eventually when we move together it will all sound pretty.

Interviewer: Wow, that’s beautiful? Is there anything after the recital that you guys do?

Informant: Not really. I can’t think of anything we do afterwards.

Interviewer: What kind of breathing exercise?

Informant: Well, at first, she has us hold our breath for like 10 seconds, or something. And then breath in and out and in and out. But then our breath has to be in sync with the others, so it’s not like we’re going “huh, huh.” (Breathing hard and erratic.) And how you’d hear like different layers of it from everybody. It’s like “in sync” breathing. So we’ll go “in 1, 2, 3, out 1, 2, 3, in . . .” It’s like different kinda like counting.

Background:

The informant is a fourteen-year-old Native American girl from the Choctaw, Blackfoot, and Lakota Nations. She was born and raised in Tennessee and frequently travels out west to visit family and friends. She is in eighth grade.

Context:

During the Covid-19 Pandemic I flew back home to Tennessee to stay with my family. The informant is my younger sister. We were in the kitchen and I asked her about different groups she was a part of at school.

Thoughts:

Not only was the choir a place to find community, it was a place of ritual, harmony and synchronization. Pre-recital was spent in meditation, softly centering the mind in balance with nature. I enjoyed hearing her explain their choir’s pre-performance routine. It was also a picture of the beauty that can come out of community and teamwork. It is not solely about the individual. Rather, individuals in a group working together as a cohesive unit. Ritual is a creative process, key in attaining a certain frame of mind and promoting active engagement.

Preparing for Performances

Main Piece:

Informant: We played with xylophone for a couple of years before percussion. And once we were able to be in percussion, you got to use it a lot more. So it’s basically for the kids that wanted to have more time playing on it and making music with it and going more into depth with the instrument. That was for those students who wanted to.

Something we did, we would go around the carpet playing different instruments. So we would say like. . . like we had this certain beat that we would do on every single one. And to prepare for all of our performances, we would do a thing called “Rock your mallets to the top.” So we would say “Rock your mallets to the top.” Then you’d go to the bottom and say, “to the bottom do not stop. Hit them in the middle please. Hit them on your long tong C’s.” And then we’d change to D’s and then we’d change to minors.

Interviewer: Do you think you could do the whole thing for me?

Informant: It’s not very long. It’s . .  *laughs,  “Rock your mallets to the top. Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. To the bottom do not stop. Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. Tap them in the middle please, doo doo loo doo doo loo. Hit them on your long tong c’s. Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom.

So we basically would do that and then we’d switch instruments. And then she would say, uh, she would just count to 3 and, or we would do certain, different like patterns and she, our music teacher, would do it and we would repeat them back. And sometimes she would say, we’d put it in different, um, you could take certain bars off. We would do C pentatonic a lot, where you take off your F’s and B’s and so there would be groups of 2 and groups of 3 and then she would ask us to do a certain thing on a group of 3 and a certain thing on a group of 2. And that’s kinda how we prepared for every single one of our performances.

Background:

The informant is a twelve-year-old Native American girl from the Choctaw, Blackfoot, and Lakota Nations. She was born and raised in Tennessee and frequently travels out west to visit family and friends. She is in sixth grade.

Context:

During the Covid-19 Pandemic I flew back home to Tennessee to stay with my family. The informant is my younger sister. I was asking her about groups she was a part of at school.

Thoughts:

She emphasized that this was a musical group for those who wanted to dive deeper into the subject, in this case, spend more time learning the instrument. It was fun to hear the rituals and chants the students would use during practice and before a performance. Ritual is a creative process, key in attaining a certain frame of mind and promoting active engagement. It is also a picture of the beauty that can come out of community and teamwork. It is not solely about the individual. Rather, individuals in a group working together as a cohesive unit.