How Music Works (12 page)

seeing and hearing, and they wanted to let us know. I sometimes think the

audience was in a funny way also applauding for themselves. Some of them

might also have been a little bit nostalgic, applauding our joint legacies as performers and audience. One forgets that part of one’s performance is one’s history—or sometimes the lack of

N

it. You’re playing against what an

audience knows, what they expect.

This seems to be true of all per-

formers; there’s baggage that gets

carried into the venue that we

can’t see. The audience wasn’t all

aging Talking Heads fans either.

There was a healthy percentage of

younger folks as well, which was great to see. Maybe keeping the ticket prices affordable helped.

In 2008, I did a tour that in some ways harkened back to the
Stop Making
Sense
extravaganza. I had collaborated on a record with Brian Eno that was more electronic folk/gospel in tone than the fierce funky workouts of
Remain
In Light
. I realized that in order to perform this music, I’d need an ensemble similar to that touring band from more than twenty years before—multiple

singers, keyboards, bass, drums, and percussion. Conveniently, with this band I could also do some of the songs we’d both been involved in, with Talking

Heads and on other projects.

Once again, I had to think about what sort of a show this could be given

the financial means available to me. I wanted to do something visual and theatrical again, since there wouldn’t be lush strings to wash over the audience anymore. Just standing there and playing wouldn’t be enough with this outfit—but what else was feasible? Lots of acts now use elaborate video screens and similar techniques to “make it bigger” on stage. I’d seen a few of these shows. I saw a Super Furry Animals show during which the video was totally

in synch with the songs throughout the whole night. Very impressive. I’d

seen pictures of U2 and other acts’ arena shows; those bands had massive

screens and all the latest technology. They hired teams of creative types to make the videos. I couldn’t compete with any of that. It costs a fortune, and their results were probably better or at least as good as anything I could pull together. And in any case, they’d already done it.

Then I saw a Sufjan Stevens show at BAM (a piece about the BQE, the

Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) during which he brought out dancers who did

simple repetitive movements with hula-hoops or other such silliness.O It

was charming and effective, moving even, something obviously low-tech that

almost anyone could do. I thought

to myself, “I’ve never had dancers on

O

stage. Why not?”

I thought I would go a little further

with the idea than Sufjan, who had a

million other things going on dur-

ing that show, like films and costume

changes. I worked with my manager

on a budget. I had learned over the

years that we could predict, based on the size of proposed performance ven-

ues, how much we might make on a tour, so we could predict if singers, danc-

ers, choreographers, and the cost of carting all of them around along with

the band was feasible. In this case, it was. Money and budgets are as much a determining factor in music and performance as anything else, but that’s for another chapter.

For the dance elements, I decided to approach “downtown” choreographers

rather than the ones who typically do music videos, R&B shows, or Broad-

way musicals. The dance vocabulary of those shows is emphatic, energetic, and exciting, but everyone has seen that stuff before, so why bother? I thought I’d spread the creative risk to increase my odds, so I approached four choreographers—Noémie Lafrance, Annie-B Parson, and the team of Sonya Robbins and

Layla Childs—rather than seeing if just one could do the whole show. This way, if one person’s contribution didn’t work out for some reason, there were still others who could carry the load. (Luckily, that didn’t happen.) Likewise, I suggested that each choreographer initially pick just two songs to work on. (They ended up doing quite a bit more than just six songs.) I provided a proposed set list, and left the choice of what to work on to them. All of the choreographers had worked with untrained dancers before, and often incorporated vernacu-lar movement into their work—moves that weren’t based on ballet or typical

modern-dance stuff. That was important for me, too; I didn’t want worlds in

collision. I see dance as something anyone can do, though I knew that inevitably the dancers would have some special skills, as we all do.

Choreographer Noémie Lafrance had recently done a video with Feist that

was widely seen. It used mostly untrained dancers, and though I didn’t nec-

essarily require my performers to have no formal dance training, I knew that I didn’t want them to obviously look like dancers. I wanted them to blend in with the rest of us. Noémie had also done a lot of sit

é

e-specifi

mie had also done a lot of sit

c w

e-specifi

or

c w

e-specific w k in s

or

wim-

k in swim-

ming pools and stairwells, so I knew she was interested in getting dance into new venues—like a pop-music concert. Annie-B Parson I’ve known forever.

I’m a fan of her company, Big Dance Theater, and she’s worked with musicians like Cynthia Hopkins, so she seemed perfect, too. Sonya Robbins and Layla

Childs are a performing/choreography duo whose work I saw in a video at an

art gallery. In that piece they wore matching primary-colored off-the-rack

outfits and did mostly pedestrian moves in unison. Sometimes they rolled

down a gully and sometimes they clambered on rocks. It was often funny and

66 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

beautiful. I didn’t know if they’d ever choreographed a “show” like this before, so they were the wild card.

I could afford three dancers and three singers in addition to the band, some of whom I’d worked with on two previous tours: Graham Hawthorne on drums,

Mauro Refosco on percussion, and Paul Frazier on bass. Mark De Gli Antoni

joined on keyboards. (He was new, though we’d once played together when he

was in the band Soul Coughing.) The singers were easy: folks I had crossed

paths with or worked with before. They were told that they’d be expected to

“do some movement.” I used that phrase rather than “dance” because I didn’t

want to give them the fearsome idea that they’d be expected to do Broadway

jazz dance. To find appropriate dancers, the choreographers sent out word to dancers and performers they knew personally. We didn’t go the route of taking out an ad, as we’d have been flooded with inappropriate people. Even so, at the beginning of the dance audition there were fifty dancers in the room.

We had two days to whittle them down to three. Cruel, but, well, fun too.

We decided that the dancers would be asked to do three types of things: exercises in which they made up their own movement, short routines which they

would be asked to memorize, and bits where they would receive notes and

suggestions as to how to improve what they’d just done. Noémie began with

an exercise I’ve never forgotten. It consisted of four simple rules:

1. Improvise moving to the music and come up with an eight-count phrase. (In dance, a
phrase
is a short series of moves that can be repeated.)

2. When you find a phrase you like, loop (repeat) it.

3. When you see someone else with a stronger phrase, copy it.

4. When everyone is doing the same phrase the exercise is over.

It was like watching evolution on fast-forward, or an emergent lifeform

coming into being. At first the room was chaos, writhing bodies everywhere.

Then one could see that folks had chosen their phrases, and almost immedi-

ately one could see a pocket of dancers who had all adopted the same phrase.

The copying had begun already, albeit just in one area. This pocket of copy-

ing began to expand, to go viral, while yet another one now emerged on the

other side of the room. One clump grew faster than the other, and within four minutes the whole room was filled with dancers moving in perfect unison.

Unbelievable! It only took four minutes for this evolutionary process to kick DAV I D BY R N E | 67

in, and for the “strongest” (unfortunate word, maybe) to dominate. It was one of the most amazing dance performances I’ve ever seen. Too bad it was over

so quickly, and that one did have to know the rules that had been laid out to appreciate how such a simple algorithm could generate unity out of chaos.

After this vigorous athletic experiment, the dancers rested while we com-

pared notes. I noticed a weird and quite loud wind like sound, rushing and

pulsing. I didn’t know what it was; it seemed to be coming from everywhere

and nowhere. It was like no sound I’d ever heard before. I realized it was the sound of fifty people catching their breath, breathing in and out, in an enclosed room. It then gradually faded away. For me that was part of the piece, too.

Having learned from the
Rei Momo
tour, I decided to go back to the white outfits. That way the dancers’ movements would pop against the musicians,

risers, and bits of gear. But as with the big Latin tour, I sensed that there was a spiritual aspect to the new songs we were playing, as well as many of the older ones, so white also hinted at associations with gospel, temples, and mosques.P

We rehearsed for a month. For the first three weeks the band and singers

learned the music in one room, while the dancers and choreographers worked

in another room two floors below. I’d pop back and forth. In the fourth week we brought the dancers and musicians together. We then did what is called

an out-of-town run: a series of shows in smaller towns to get the bugs out,

where no one in the press would see what we were up to. Our first show was in Easton, Pennsylvania, in a lovely old restored theater in a little once-industrial town. There were some rough patches, but the big surprise was that the audience—hardly a contemporary-dance crowd—loved it. Well, they didn’t go

nuts, but they didn’t balk at the dance stuff. It was going to be okay.

And it got better. I realized that the dancers, and the singers who some-

times joined them, raised the energy level of the whole show. I joined them

when I could, and to do so felt ecstatic, but my interaction was limited by my singing and guitar-playing duties. Even so, they all became part of the whole, not a separate part tacked on. Over the course of the tour we took this idea further: some of the dancers would sing, some would play guitar, and eventually we added bits that blurred the boundaries between dancers, singers, and musicians. A little bit of an ideal world in microcosm.

The out-of-town tryout part was kind of a bust. That aspect of put-

ting a performance together has been forever altered by cell-phone cameras

and YouTube. Barely minutes after our shows were over, someone would

68 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

announce that some of the numbers were appearing online. In the past, per-

formers would at least try to limit amateur photographers and especially

video cameras, but now that idea seemed simply ridiculous—hopeless. We

realized there was a silver lining: they liked our show and their postings were functioning as free advertising. The thing we were supposed to be fighting

against was actually something we should be encouraging. They were getting

the word out, and it wasn’t costing me anything. I began to announce at the

beginning of the shows that photography was welcome, but I suggested to

please only post shots and videos where we look good.

I talked with the dancers and choreographers as the show began to gel, and

we all agreed that contemporary dance, a rarified world where the audiences

are usually very small, was indeed, as this show proved, accessible to some

part of the general public. It wasn’t the movement or choreography itself that was keeping the audiences small for this stuff, but the context. The exact

same choreography in a dance venue, without a live pop band? This audience

in Easton, Pennsylvania would never go see it in a million years. But here, in this context, they seemed to like it. The way one sees things, and the expectations one brings to a performance, or any art form, really, is completely determined by the venue. Poetry is a tough sell, but with a beat it’s rap, which is wildly successful. Okay, it’s not exactly the same, but you get the idea. I once saw a theater piece that had a lot of music in it; it sort of failed as a theater piece, but I told the producer, “If you position it as an imaginatively staged concert, it’s incredibly successful.”