WMV Music Web Log

I've been thinking, or rather thinking that it would be a good idea to be thinking, about what makes people congregate, in the context of performance, which of course requires an audience. What sorts of restrictions, preferences, fears, motivations etc are involved.

So I had a dream last night: it was an open mike situation, the expected motley crew of guitars, keyboards, singers, drummers, poets, and unclassifiable. One young fellow was playing some wind instrument with earphones attached to a boom box - I guess he wanted the backup guidance to be audible only to himself. The scene was the stairwell of a chain bookstore, and every once in awhile the manager would storm out the door and tell someone to cool it, or that everyone had to move to the other side of the stairwell. No one protested and everyone was well-behaved until things would begin to heat up and get rowdy again and the scene with the manager would repeat. Apparently occasionally some lucky participant would get booked to perform inside the bookstore (for $25), or at least that was the hope, and part of the problem was that they didn't want the sound from the outsiders to compete with what was going on inside. A very informative and graphic dream, I think.

Issues of outsider/insider, level of artistic transgression, control of the venue - all these things arise. But really, the dream doesn't tell us much about audience - or does it?