BackStage

I went to a concert last night. It was the type of music that mostly appeals to those a little further along in life than I. In fact, I was probably one of the three youngest people in the crowd. (In statistical terms, I image the mean age was about 62 with a standard deviation of 2.3 years.) The venue was fairly small, although it has been famous in its day.

When you walk into the venue, straight in front of you is a bar. To your right is the sound booth and steps that are shrouded by curtains. To your left you find a ring of chairs and a stage. The stage was simply that–a small stage, no curtains, no place to enter (except through the crowd).

The music was fine. I enjoyed it. The audience seemed mostly comatose, except when the musicians told some long winded story about how they developed a song–or made a joke about having a “senior moment.” Intermission was interesting. With nowhere to go (besides to disappear behind the curtained stairwell that was 25 feet from the stage), they mostly walked around and talked to the crowd. The fiddle player drank wine. The guitarist sat behind a table and tried to sell “combination spaghetti strainers and back scratchers” along with the mandated CDs.

It was the end of the show that was most interesting. The band heartily thanked the audience and ran off stage to a standing ovation. The band stopped short of going behind the curtain, turned, looked at each other, and then ran back on stage. It was an encore!

I could not stop laughing for a few minutes. It was one of the most ridiculous displays I had ever seen! They ran off to simply run back on. But as I struggled to not laugh audibly (I’m sure both the husband and the surrounding audience would not have approved of me chortling over their “encore” love song), I realized what had just happened. THEY HAD NO BACKSTAGE.

It was Goffman, in his Presentation of Everyday Life, that first argued for the importance of a backstage, or:

“a place, relative to a given performance, where the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course” (112).

The backstage is necessary so that we can keep the audience believing the performances that occur in front of them. It is in the backstage that we fix costumes or take them off. It’s where we practice our roles. This is so the front stage can be reserved only for impression management techniques–trying to come of in a particular way to our audiences.

The musicians had no backstage. I suppose they could have uncomfortably filed up the stairs behind that curtain (which they had to do at the end of the show), and then run back down them when we refused to stop our applause. But, short of that, their only choice was to run out behind the audience, huddle, turn around, and run back up–which is what they did. As the audience, we expect the encore–we demand it. If they had just thanked the audience and left, we would have felt cheated out of our “extra” song. In the ritual to indicate that the show was indeed over, they needed to come back up, play one more and then exit for good.

We all have a myriad of front stages and backstages. As academics (and graduate students), we may have more than most. But, also as academics, we often lack what those musicians had–others to huddle with in our pretend backstages. Even when we have others vet our articles, we are still often concerned with what they will think of your early draft. When we are in seminars (I am speaking of graduate students, but I suppose professors may feel the same way), we are concerned with how our ideas will sound and protective of what others think of us. What all this means is that even when we are supposed to be in some sort of backstage–a protected area where we can admit that we need help, or even that we have no clue what Lacan (per example) is trying to say–it is often, in reality, a front stage. We are still working on our impression management in terms of what professors and other students think of us.

I NEED a backstage DAMMIT! I want an area to talk about the ideas I have, the questions I have, and get feedback from others. In some ways, I imagine that this backstage will be about as private as the musicians’ was (as anonymous as I try to be, I’m sure some people will figure out who I am).

So, if you are interested in sociological (or even, at times, psychological) social psychology, the trials of graduate school (and soon I hope, I hope, I hope the job market), and weird research ideas–this blog is for you.

My main hope is that you will comment and comment often. I hope we can start a conversation (and not just about what the heck Lacan is saying) about many MANY research ideas which seem to come from absolutely nowhere–or insanity.