Performance Ethnography Essay

As I waited for the blue-robed clan to ascend the Holy Mountain, I could feel the cold sweat run down the back of my neck, balance to the hot pulse in my ringing ears. The cacophonous noise, optic saturation, blindly inebriated surrender to all things synesthetic—a one-night amalgam of sensory overload was the fortuitous result of the most unusual elements. Together, a gay club, noise rock and surrealist film provided equilibrium between two widely variant cultures for a performance both entertaining and enlightening.

Walking down to the White Mice show, I really only expected to have my ears blown. I heard the Providence noise scene was a force to be reckoned with, that its fans took the music as seriously as its bands did, and that earplugs were strongly advised. Yet this fervor, if nothing else, implied to me a vibrant subculture with lively shows and passionate members. The night was far more than this, to say the least. Even just walking up to the venue, visible septum piercings, jagged Mohawks and overwhelming body odor alerted me to the authenticity of the hardcore fans, emphasized by their cryptic cant and insouciant candor. Pushing my way through a sea of Marlboros to the door, I quickly broke eye contact with the shadowy doorman, and quicker hid my notebook in pocket. Ultimately friendly, at face the crowd at the Dark Lady did not appear too welcoming.

But this would be the first of many surprises throughout the night. Despite glares from bystanders outside, the women at the desk were warm and friendly, or so I thought until I met the effeminate, affectionate bartenders. This was the first major contrast during the night, and the first large question about the event: how did a notoriously homosexual club and hardcore noise scene come to coexist in an evening’s performance? Why these cultures? Why here? Why now? All the staff, most all the audience, were all smiles, jokes, and spirit. What in theory sounded like an absurd combination presented itself to be a natural partnership of kindred subcultures, weakly linked in the Providence periphery.

For me, culturally enforced gender stereotypes portray most gay clubs in urban America commonplace for disco revivals and Cher karaoke. One certainly imagines late nights of drinking and dancing, perhaps even pride nights and drag shows. At great distance from this stereotypical culture I thought to find Providence noise shows, but I was mistaken. In recent months, the Dark Lady has collaborated with local noise rock, hardcore and underground indie bands to present a series called Paint It Pink, a loosely curated series whose MySpace profile boasts the motto: “Paint It Pink wants to book the gayest show you’ll ever play.” Sure, gay club: gay music: okay, I get it. But the puzzling pairing with noise rock seemed unfitting for the Dark Lady, whose crystalline chandeliers were adorned with pink feather boas, whose bar featured a dozen brightly colored liqueurs. Moreover, for the first hour waiting for the show to start, I found myself sipping drinks rather quickly to offset the collective tension of concertgoers viewing two wall-size screenings of midgets and transsexuals fellating enormous, enormous dicks. Even some of the most metallic punks in the room seemed slightly off put.

Soon as the music started, the porn stopped—the atmosphere even stranger. The first act, Suffering Bastard, tore through a set of 20 one-minute songs, pausing their aural assault for momentary introductions like: “This one’s about shit!” or “This one is for the Fonz, heyyy.” Ever-shifting from half time to triple time, the band nearly destroyed their two basses, grinding them between pelvis and amplifier for distorted effects while the lead singer bit his own arm repeatedly, drawing blood.

The second band, Pygmy Shrews, was rhythmically more consistent yet lacked the hardcore potency of Suffering Bastard, sticking to a more accessible post-hardcore featuring female vocals, astutely observed by one unseen audience member to sound like “a really fucked-up Bratmobile.” This appeal was not lost on the gen(d)erally indifferent audience who seemed drawn to the vocalist’s defined androgyny and masculine presence, I noted as a few Dark Lady regulars took their fingers from their ears.

After the first two bands played in rapid succession, the headliners of the bill, White Mice, delayed performance for a seemingly endless stint at the bar with a whiskey bottle. As the lights dimmed a large man, dressed in garb befitting a tyrannical Russian czar took center stage, shouting introductions from blank pages, wearing a turban made of film rolls. And then… well I’d never experienced anything quite like it. Three white mice, eyes glowing red from heads torn and mangled, assailing their instruments into a jarring din, enrapturing an audience of dozens into a swaying, sweating, submissive frenzy. Half moshing, half meditating, the audience reacted to White Mice’s every note; one could watch the faces of those closest to the stage, contorting with every shift in the endless drone of distortion. To say there was interaction between White Mice and their audience might be a stretch—they said virtually nothing from stage, had no discernable lyrics to sing along with, and rarely fell into any regular beat suited for dance of any kind. Nevertheless, the audience loved it and applauded enthusiastically at the conclusion of a 45 minute set.

Strangely enough, the most obvious link between these two cultures was the visual presentation during the musical performances. A muted showing of “The Holy Mountain,” 1972 Lennon/Ono-sponsored, Jodorowsky-directed cult classic cum mescaline trip transported the audience from the Dark Lady to a post-Dadaist dreamland, at some points tracking the screaming vocal lines to protest portrayals, doves bursting forth from peoples’ chests, and at other points underscoring deep bass drones with shot after shot of clans climbing mountains, shaving their heads, and partaking in sacrificial rituals. The juxtaposition offered little explanation of the scene the audience found themselves in, yet seemed to provide a subtle reconciliation.

It then became clear—the answer to all those “why” questions I had asked myself when I first entered. As I watched factory clones model manufactured anatomical parts, I began tying together the possible connections between these two cultures—noise rock and gay nightclub—only to discover that the overlaps were as innumerable as they were remote. A penchant for self-indulgence, affinity for a trancelike state, the idea of public display as a projected self-image, populating a real environment in which things could be both simulated yet honestly exaggerated—the cultures awkwardly fit together by melding performance into space by means of clever curation. While the show was certainly anamolous in the larger music scene, it certainly worked well this night and emphasized the not-so-impervious barriers between oft relegated subcultures, perhaps even foreshadowed future cross-cultural exchange.

What struck me most about the night was that both subcultures existed so strongly before the new series Paint It Pink. It was not the case where one dominant culture advocates another, nor where both collaborate for mutual survival. Rather, the collaboration seemed purely creative and succeeded in achieving a artistic synthesis in which the audience was shown but a greater glimpse at the underlying nature of both cultures, their small shared essence, in the shared glorification of real performance.

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