the urgent artist

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A media reader to parallel our work

Watch these.  They’re all worthwhile videos (in my mind) and i’ve arranged them going from the rawest performance – one of my all time favorites of Fiona Apple covering Elvis Costello’s “I Want You” where she literally looks like she’s going to kill someone – to Beverly Knight’s cover of “Take Another Little Piece of My Heart” where she seems completely oblivious to the lyrics of the song, the fact that she didn’t write it, or anything other than her million dollar smile.

Please note: well damn.

4 more vids + my analysis and questions after the jump…

Please note: awkward poncho girl, the slow-dancing couple, awkward spastic boy, “meat & potatoes” 50’s dancing guy, the circle of men around Janis, and the heartfelt hipster.

Please note: the trills and repeats, the bouncing up and down, the woman clapping at the end.

Please note: Carrie’s smiles, Carrie’s dancing, Paula Abdul, and the way Ryan Seacrest feels the need to explain what’s just happened to her.

(embedding disabled, but watch here – trust me, it’s worth it!)
Please note: the smile/smize/singing/flirting, the “narrative” of the music video with Beverly “writing” and then recording, the way she mouths “did you like it?” at the end.

So that’s the spectrum, and the worry, to be honest.  Art making very often comes from a raw emotional place.  The experience that sparks or necessitates is is often complex, problematic, traumatizing, raw, and culturally/emotionally loaded.  Especially with what we’re working on now, the actual event or idea is a nugget of something very real and very honest.  And then it gets made into art.  If you’re good at your art – if you’re great – then it retains those qualities and even illuminates them or help disect them.  And then someone makes a cover, and so it goes down the chain, until here we are at the present day with Carrie and Beverly, sans rawness plus pearly whites.

I’m interested in the spectrum, in how the one who starts it must view the ones who come after, and what’s lost and/or gained as we translate our experiences into performance.  I’m also interested at trying my hand at being part of the meta-dialogue started youtube generation of choreographers (ie: Neal Medlyn, Ashley Byler, etc) and seeing what happens if we pull unrelated details from these performances to create a performance environment and an internal logic that isn’t the same reality as that of the rest of the piece.  We’ll post video soon of what we’re playing with – i want to work on it a little longer first – and we’ll see where it goes.

In the meantime, any suggestions of totally raw (or ridiculously nice) performances?

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Tags: Beverly Knight, Carrie Underwood, Fiona Apple, Janis Joplin, Mary J. Blige, Neal Medlyn, performance, spectrum, Take It/Feel Good, video