My project began with my interest in P.T. Barnum. My research has led me to focus less strictly on him and more on his relationship with certain people, exhibits, and animals in his shows. I have been using text from his autobiography to create songs that will come to be associated with the persona of Barnum. Compositionally, the singing will come to represent a place where the voice is linked to the body. I derived additional text for the piece from the language of Barnum’s world and disciplinary techniques for children. I sing the Barnum text from one side of the performance space, so that it resonates distinctly with Barnum’s voice and the voice of authority.
My questions have become: In Barnum’s shows, who is doing the speaking? For whom and for what purpose? In a sense, I learned that the acts of Barnum’s world did not have the chance to speak, vocalize, and move for themselves. However, I am not necessarily trying to speak for them because I would be doing the same thing that Barnum had done. My fragmentation of the different modes worked as modes of resistance to standards of language and to a privileged position of speaking. The piece has become a reconstruction of language of text, voice, and movement based on the dynamics of the relationship between Barnum and the acts in his shows. Barnum was their voice in the media and their choreographer in the hundreds of sold out shows. He spoke for them. He positioned and moved them. It was this speaking and choreography that framed the audience’s perception of them. This understanding of language as a frame helped me structure the various announcements that introduced different movement portraits.
