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Back to the theater

I am often a 10-yr-old when it comes to maintaining my composure about profanity, so I was prepared to giggle a little and look around for gasps from the blue hairs in the audience at REDCAT, since I knew what was coming. But I was pleasantly surprised. No one balked. No one walked out.

From the very beginning, this dance piece separates the song from a warm, intimate listening experience. The stage setting is bare and white, with a few objects placed on the stage: wine bottles, a microphone, a chair. A single female dancer enters the room from behind the audience in silence. She slowly crosses to a tape recorder and presses “play.”

Morton’s song plays from the tape, through a microphone. Listening to the crackling bits of audio from the Lomax recording through a theater’s sound system, is an experience very far removed from a live musician inviting you to hear a story. Neither are you listening alone on your headphones. You are listening in a group, lecture-like. The lyrics appear as supratitles projected above the playing space. All elements combine to create the sense that this event is about the song, as its own object, not a retelling of the story within the song. The dance performance seems almost separate from the music, as if the dance and dancers are still curious about the song playing continuously in the background. This made the more linear moments fit strangely well, instead of look too literal.

The movements were riddled with tension (sex, anger, madness) in the bodies, of course, but also in their faces. The familiar neutral mask of dance allowed the material to exist without judgment. When they used their faces in contorted ways or in acting moments, it very effectively changed the dancers roles from victim to aggressor, male to female, judge to jury.

Morton’s “Murder Ballad” is a crime of passion song, going in and out of the protagonist’s story. It is mostly told from her point of view, but you never really know.  She has no name. If a woman were singing it, the narrator and protagonist might blend together even more. In The Murder Ballad the two dancers float in and out of gender and point of view, playing with this ambiguity about the narrator.

Photos: Steve Gunther

The female dancer, Jessica Emmanuel, informs her movements with emotional depth, not just outward indication. She leads the audience through an unapologetic full journey of this character without forcing it or soliciting only the audience’s pity. At moments she is terrifying. Portraying women as aggressors and not just as victims in art/media/song gives tired tropes another outcome. It’s also truthful.

As performance art, The Murder Ballad develops common themes of the murder ballad genre in evocative ways. Water, for instance, simply and effectively stands in for a range of fluids suitable to the violent, sexualized, and often alcohol-soaked context of the story. Buckets and bottles pour onto the floor and into the protagonist’s mouth, physicalizing the challenges of the characters and themes in the song.

We mentioned previously, in our fourth murder ballad comedy post last year, that repetition (overkill), a common storytelling element of a murder ballad, can easily turn a song from morose to funny, and possibly back again. People can end up laughing because you’re just going on and on about this murder. Every little piece along the way is explained: what they made for breakfast how many times he stopped to tie his shoe before he killed her. It makes for a very clear complete story by the end, but in our sound bite world I feel like you almost have to keep going even further until you break through the “I get it, move on” feeling. Jelly Roll Morton definitely keeps doling it out, 30 minutes. This slow, deliberate pace of a murder ballad, the same pace afforded to visual art and theater, is what allows you to make connections of concepts you might otherwise miss. You are given permission by the form to take time with the material.

The Old is the New

There is so much to unpack in Morton’s song by itself: racism, sexism, privilege, the prison industrial system, homophobia, feminism, gender constructs and violence, profanity in modern popular music, women owning their pleasure, and more. Maybe sometime down the line we’ll tackle the song more directly. The virtue of Poor Dog’s performance of The Murder Ballad is that it raises, quite effectively, questions of past and present that shed light on how we might interpret artistic and cultural legacy of violent music.

I found it easy to not get bothered by Morton’s lyrics within the context of the show, mostly because of the divide between the “song story” and “dance story” that I’ve already mentioned. Also, because it’s an old song, I somehow don’t get mad at the lyrics for their profanity or misogyny, whereas a new song or work of art will feel to me like a personal affront or just plain laziness. Why is this person calling women “bitches”? Why are they using rape as a punch line? Etc. Etc. Maybe I don’t feel offended by Morton because that world has passed, years have passed. I can distance myself from it. It feels like a study of a time, rather than a comment on the current time.

I suppose you could say this for any work of art. In the present, it is a conversation, with a changeable outcome, with the possibility for cultural progress and a conversation that I want a voice in. I wonder if, in his own way, Morton intended to put sex and gender under a microscope back then. Is it a cultural freedom from convention and construct now (in discussion, if not politics) that adds these layers? The depiction of women’s sexual desire as hysteria/madness, sex and gender role non-conformity, and sexual violence surely all existed when the song was new. Was it talked about in the same way as it is now? Our current debates about these matters often carry an illusion of newness to them, when they are likely very old.

Photo: Steve Gunther

I wonder what the real time contemporary discussions were. What were they saying in the Storyville district in 1938? Well, we definitely have one snippet of the conversation in the form of Jelly Roll Morton’s “Murder Ballad.” So we know definitively that they were swearing. And that gives me great comfort.