The Festival of Smiling by Paul Boyé
It was the first cold weekend of the year. Coldness, in the southwest, a place of two summers, is a highly anticipated meteorological horizon. And yet, it comes as a surprise. Underdressed fools like myself shiver and shuffle our feet; a parade of scarves and shawls begin their procession around our necks and between our touching shoulders. The first night of Audible Edge (AE) was huddled, and yet the burgeoning counter-cultural atmosphere warmed the hapless shivering masses.
I hope you will pardon my clumsy small-talk about the weather, and indulge a similarly clumsy continuity of this metaphor. Culture in Perth (perhaps everywhere else too) is, at the moment, a bit frosty and unyielding; frozen in place by a lack of risk-taking and vision. The official cultural institutions all have their tongues stuck against a frosty light pole, from a lick/risk/dare they took far too long ago for anyone to remember. Desperately, the aim now is to dress up this embarrassing posture to look elegant, cool and urgent.
Conversely, in the unofficial counter-cultural margins, AE takes on plenty of licks/risks/dares, and revels in the briefly embarrassing postures one might find themselves within. AE licks the frozen light pole, uses it as a resonant device, then opens their gullet to receive the highly lauded drinks of the festival, the ‘cold toddy’, courtesy of concept bar Larry’s Arms. Perhaps the success of the cold toddy speaks to the warmth of the festival, working against the grain of coldness culture at large.
The term ‘unofficial counter-cultural margin’ might be concerning you, reader, and you deserve an explanation. I’m looking to explain my reading of AE as a ‘festival’ as such, especially as I believe one of the great achievements of AE this year was reaching peak festivalism. Here I’m drawing from Mikael Bakhtin’s early twentieth century analysis of the folk festival, a cultural event of centrifugal laughter, revelry, ecstasy and openness. The ‘unofficial’ culture of the folk festival is opposed to the centripetal motion of conformative culture toward hierarchy and isolation. Bakhtin proposes a principle of carnivalistic laughter that dismantles and transcends the handwringing worries of official culture:
“Carnivalistic laughter is likewise directed toward something higher – toward a shift of authorities and truths, a shift of world orders. Laughter embraces both poles of change, it deals with the very process of change, with crisis itself. Combined in the act of carnival laughter are death and rebirth, negation (a smirk) and affirmation (rejoicing laughter). This is a profoundly universal laughter, a laughter that contains a whole outlook on the world”.
(Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 1929).
The carnival collective is a fecund ground for the growth of an unofficial culture of laughter, as opposed to the official culture of order. For Bakhtin, the individualism of the latter is dissolved in the crowd-ambivalence of laughter, ambivalent due to its radical collective warmth, toward a utopian time and place.
It might be reductive or uninteresting to focus on the dimensions of laughter or smiling that make up the warmth of AE, but it is in Bakhtin's notion of the ‘smirk’ that I find the essence of the counter-culture nurtured by AE, and broadly the exploratory music community in Perth. At AE this year, the smirk marks not only the buoyant and friendly exchanges of people throughout the festival, but also the signal of a conclusion to a performance of improvised music. No matter how emotionally or spiritually tense a room can get through these performances – aided greatly by the carnal/profane artistic interventions made by Jess Tan, counterposed against the cathedralesque play of light and haze in the hall – the smirk draws us all back into a sheer humanity, a warm huddle. I can name two instances of deep smirk pay off: firstly, after reaching deeply alien sonic territory via wormhole conjured by Umbel – aptly described in the program with the tag ‘microtonal obsessional’ – a shared relaxation of the shoulders, and a smirk amongst players, reattached my ears to my head. The second instance was with the Friday evening performance of Jonny Marks, whose Rabelaisian vocal extremes produced an epic density of growls, barks and resonance that pulled up the crowd’s shoulders (I was sitting on the stage, counting each and every spiked up hair on the napes of each audience member). While there was not a witnessable smirk as such, Marks’ retreat into the darkness of the mezzanine stage threw back a Cheshire Smile, then replicated onto the crowd’s previously agog mugs.
Wicked smirks aside, the peak festivalism of AE achieved this year could also be attributed to the organisers focusing their attention on a single location: Victoria Hall and its recently fitted-out gallery and courtyard, Fremantle Small Projects. This had an effect of amplifying the magic circle which is so often key to otherwise easily dismissed works of experimental and precarious art. Johan Huizinga theorised that it was in limits of space – play-grounds – that magic circles for playing are constructed: “temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart” (Homo Ludens, 1950). While it would almost certainly cast dispersions and misrepresentations on the festival itself, I feel that instead of the academically officious notion of ‘exploratory’ music, a subtitle for AE could read ‘A festival of playing music’. However, I understand the vulnerability art can take on by admitting its place within ‘play’, with the culture of coldness creeping in to miscast it as unserious, unnecessary and discardable.
Perhaps most importantly, the unpretentiously counter-cultural efforts of hospitality made by the organisers, collaborators and staff of AE must be acknowledged. This is a great achievement, and not one that should be taken so lightly as simply ‘being nice’. It is the result of genuine care between people, and advocacy between organisations — two hackneyed words cursed by the tongue-stuck-on-pole cultural officials, as they mumble and drool their mission and vision statements over and over again. AE achieves instead a warm smile amongst play, once a year, as the cold weather begins.