Rock Stew

Honestly speaking, I could not enjoy Stew’s Notes of a Native Song. I was exhausted from a long week of sleepless nights and a PE class that always leaves me with sore legs. So yeah, I was dozing off during the first half of the performance. Although I think one of the biggest reasons why I could not enjoy the performance is because I was expecting so much more. Something more like Passing Strange, of which I absolutely adored every single bit of. The witty writing. The melody and rock-style melody that weaved everything together. The engaging narrative. The expressions of the actors. All of it was just much more engaging for me than Notes of a Native Song, and I honestly don’t really understand why, because I’ve always been a fan of rock.

Although that might be a big part of the reason why, because while I have always been a fan of rock music, I was never the type to immediately pay attention to lyrics in music. As a matter of fact, a lot of the “rock” music that I listen to are purely instrumental. For me the melody comes first, and listening to, and understanding, lyrics on the first try requires an extreme amount of effort from me. The worst part (for me) is Stew actually made the songs in a way that emphasizes the importance of the lyrics. Especially in the first ones, the melody was not anything specific that was easy to get absorbed into. It was more of a musicalized speech than a song itself. In the later songs this was less the case, which I think is part of the reason why I became more engaged towards that part of the performance.

One thing that I think made it really hard for me in the beginning had to do with the assumption that the audience would immediately grasp the concept of the performance through the songs. I did not realize the performance was about James Baldwin at the beginning, even though I had actually heard about that beforehand. In the later songs, when Stew started to introduce each new song, I started to become more engaged in the whole show. I felt like I was actually getting something, some ideas, other than listening to rock music that, for some reason, did not really appeal to me. Because as Stew said, “ideas matter.”

But speaking about the music, it was not all just unappealing sounds. I was absolutely amazed by the skill and energy of the drummer, and it’s the moment I remember most vividly from the performance. His solo, I mean. Which came in at a moment that I cannot really recall right now. Because the rest of it was hard to focus on. I also adored the violin, but that is probably because I really like listening to violins in general. People always seek to find comfort in familiarity, and I think the fact that the parts of the performance that I found more enjoyable were the more instrumental ones is a clear example of that.

Other than that, visual aesthetic elements in Notes of a Native Song did not ever seem to be very meaningful. There was a moment in which Stew changed the hat he was wearing, but I had no idea why he was doing that and what he did afterwards did not tell me anything about that. There was also a moment when Stew changed the part of the stage he was positioned in, but that also did not strike me as very interesting. Possibly, it is only because of the space he performed in. Maybe in a more intimate setting, these changes in position would have been more impactful. But with the distance from the stage that was in place in the black box at NYUAD, this did not come across very effectively.

But then something that really threw me off was the whole idea of dealing with the “indexical present” (as Adrian Piper defines it, “the concrete, immediate here-and-now”). I had heard already twice (both in Stew’s playwrighting workshop and when he came to talk to our class) about the way that he would perform. He always spoke about his rock concerts being something that feeds off the way the audience reacts to it. He spoke about changing his performance according to the general mood of the audience. And I had heard twice about the frikkin Kanye allusion to explain the relationship between Wright and Baldwin. And of course, I found it amazing how he said he one day decided to stop the show mid-way and just explain the whole thing to his teenage audience and the teenagers’ response of awe.

But then when that happened in the performance at NYUAD I was severely underwhelmed by the way it was done. The halt in the middle of the performance seemed to well rehearsed. All of the musicians stopped almost at the same time right when Stew was telling them to just stop the music. And then he proceeded to tell the story, but it did not feel as impactful as he had told before.

Although there was a moment where I could notice that he was almost just speaking as he pleased. He was explaining a song and was about to put on his glasses to start playing a song, but he arrested the gesture and went back to speaking to the audience for a few more minutes. That moment caught my attention. It seemed like a genuine attempt at following his own gut. Maybe it is just because I had already heard him speak twice about his performance style, but when Stew did that I really felt like he was living in the “moment,” in the “indexical present.”

I think that this performance was an attempt at being something it did not accomplish. Not for me at least. The performance was trying to be something that would bring together an audience and that would at the same time tell some stories about James Baldwin. In the state I was in when I saw it, the latter did not connect very effectively, and it didn’t feel as if the performance really managed to accomplish the former. There is a divide that takes place as soon as the performers are separated from the audience through the use of a specific staging form, like the proscenium arch-like setup in the black box. I remember how back in high school, me and some classmates would sometimes sit in a classroom, someone would start playing a tune on the guitar, and somebody else would start to sing or tell a story. That was engaging. That was something that flowed with the reactions of the audience then present. The safe environment that is created when you know the people who are performing is something indispensable. Something that Stew did not have under his belt when performing here. And something that was difficult for me to give him, because I, like many others, simply want to watch a performance for afar sometimes. Sometimes don’t have the energy to fully and emotionally engage with a person we don’t fully know. And of course, simply because how are you going to meet over 100 people right before the start of a show? This is why making full use of the “indexical present” is difficult: it’s not practical for commercial performances. At least not in the case of music (because I have seen improvised shows that are created on the spot with only some input from the audience, and stand-up comedy is something that always must keep the “indexical present” present). But then again, maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe a lot of the music that took place on that stage was improvised and actually was reacting to the audience. I would never know though, since I only saw the show once. And even if that was the case, perhaps I was simply not in the same mood as the rest of the audience. It’s tough to be a spectator in a sea of many.