xylo-
phone-like instruments—the interplay
between the parts is beautiful and
intricate.) In these latter events some
participants would often fall into a
trance, but even in trance there were
DAV I D BY R N E | 51
prescribed procedures. It wasn’t all thrashing chaos, as a Westerner might
expect, but a deeper kind of dance.I
As in Japanese theater, the performers often wore masks and extreme
makeup; their movements, too, were stylized and “unnatural.” It began to sink in that this kind of “presentational” theater had more in common with certain kinds of pop-music performance than traditional Western theater did.
I was struck by other seemingly peripheral aspects of these performances.
The audiences, mostly local villagers of all ages, weren’t paying attention half the time. People would wander in and out, go get a snack from a cart or leave to smoke a bidi cigarette, and then return to watch some more. This was more like the behavior of audiences in music clubs than in Western theaters, where they were expected to sit quietly and only leave or converse once the show
was over.
These Balinese “shows” were completely integrated into people’s daily lives, or so it seemed to me. There was no attempt to formally separate the ritual and the show from the audience. Everything seemed to flow into everything else.
The food, the music, and the dance were all just another part of daily activity.
I remembered a story about John Cage, who, when in Japan, asked someone
what their religion was. The reply was that they didn’t have a strict religion—
they danced. Japanese do, of course, have Buddhist and Shinto rituals for weddings, funerals, and marriages, but a weekly thing like going to church or temple doesn’t exist. The “religion” is so integrated into the culture that it appears in I
52 | HOW MUSIC WORKS
daily gesture and routines, unsegregated from ordinary life. I was beginning to see that theatricality wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It was part of life in much of the world, and not necessarily phony either.
I guess I was primed to receive this new way of looking at performance,
but I quickly absorbed that it was all right to make a show that didn’t pretend to be “natural.” The Western emphasis on pseudo-naturalism and the cult of
spontaneity as a kind of authenticity was only one way of doing things on
stage. I decided that maybe it was okay to wear costumes and put on a show.
It didn’t imply insincerity at all; in fact, this kind of practiced performance was all around, if one only looked at it. The services in a gospel church are funky and energetic, but they are prescribed and happen in almost identical
sequences over and over. That doesn’t make them any less real or less power-
ful. In the world of the ecstatic church, religion bleeds into performance, and there are obvious musical parallels with what we were doing.
In Los Angeles I collaborated with Toni to make a music video for a cou-
ple of the songs from Remain in Light . For “Once in a Lifetime,” I worked out an elaborate dance routine that borrowed from Japanese street dance, gospel
trance, and some of my own improvisations. Toni had worked with untrained
dancers before, so she knew how to get me to make my improvised moves,
edit them, select the best ones, refine them further, and begin to order them into a sequence. It took weeks to get the moves tight. It was all going to be filmed in one master shot, so I had to be able to perform the whole thing from top to bottom without stopping on multiple takes. It was a song-and-dance
routine, as she described it, though nothing like what one normally thinks of when one hears that phrase.
We added little film snippets during the editing that revealed the source
material for some of the moves: a few seconds of a kid dancing in Yoyogi
Park in Tokyo (dancing there is now forbidden!) and a few frames from an
anthropological film about African dance,
phone-like instruments—the interplay
between the parts is beautiful and
intricate.) In these latter events some
participants would often fall into a
trance, but even in trance there were
DAV I D BY R N E | 51
prescribed procedures. It wasn’t all thrashing chaos, as a Westerner might
expect, but a deeper kind of dance.I
As in Japanese theater, the performers often wore masks and extreme
makeup; their movements, too, were stylized and “unnatural.” It began to sink in that this kind of “presentational” theater had more in common with certain kinds of pop-music performance than traditional Western theater did.
I was struck by other seemingly peripheral aspects of these performances.
The audiences, mostly local villagers of all ages, weren’t paying attention half the time. People would wander in and out, go get a snack from a cart or leave to smoke a bidi cigarette, and then return to watch some more. This was more like the behavior of audiences in music clubs than in Western theaters, where they were expected to sit quietly and only leave or converse once the show
was over.
These Balinese “shows” were completely integrated into people’s daily lives, or so it seemed to me. There was no attempt to formally separate the ritual and the show from the audience. Everything seemed to flow into everything else.
The food, the music, and the dance were all just another part of daily activity.
I remembered a story about John Cage, who, when in Japan, asked someone
what their religion was. The reply was that they didn’t have a strict religion—
they danced. Japanese do, of course, have Buddhist and Shinto rituals for weddings, funerals, and marriages, but a weekly thing like going to church or temple doesn’t exist. The “religion” is so integrated into the culture that it appears in I
52 | HOW MUSIC WORKS
daily gesture and routines, unsegregated from ordinary life. I was beginning to see that theatricality wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It was part of life in much of the world, and not necessarily phony either.
I guess I was primed to receive this new way of looking at performance,
but I quickly absorbed that it was all right to make a show that didn’t pretend to be “natural.” The Western emphasis on pseudo-naturalism and the cult of
spontaneity as a kind of authenticity was only one way of doing things on
stage. I decided that maybe it was okay to wear costumes and put on a show.
It didn’t imply insincerity at all; in fact, this kind of practiced performance was all around, if one only looked at it. The services in a gospel church are funky and energetic, but they are prescribed and happen in almost identical
sequences over and over. That doesn’t make them any less real or less power-
ful. In the world of the ecstatic church, religion bleeds into performance, and there are obvious musical parallels with what we were doing.
In Los Angeles I collaborated with Toni to make a music video for a cou-
ple of the songs from Remain in Light . For “Once in a Lifetime,” I worked out an elaborate dance routine that borrowed from Japanese street dance, gospel
trance, and some of my own improvisations. Toni had worked with untrained
dancers before, so she knew how to get me to make my improvised moves,
edit them, select the best ones, refine them further, and begin to order them into a sequence. It took weeks to get the moves tight. It was all going to be filmed in one master shot, so I had to be able to perform the whole thing from top to bottom without stopping on multiple takes. It was a song-and-dance
routine, as she described it, though nothing like what one normally thinks of when one hears that phrase.
We added little film snippets during the editing that revealed the source
material for some of the moves: a few seconds of a kid dancing in Yoyogi
Park in Tokyo (dancing there is now forbidden!) and a few frames from an
anthropological film about African dance,
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