Staking their credibility on being the first to report ‘breaking news’, media outlets
compete to collect, collate and report snippets of information, no matter how
seemingly trivial.
Teams of experts and witnesses are corralled to interpret this data and identify those
responsible, their political affiliation, their motive, and their process of ‘radicalization’.
Speculation abounds as reporters, fearful of losing an increasingly saturated audience,
construct hypothetical narratives linking the event to identifiable social problems. As
news stories synchronize across media outlets, as particular photographs become
iconic through their reprinting, as events are translated into documentaries, Hollywood
blockbusters, and made-for-TV movies, the incident is confirmed as a major event
through its repeated reproduction.
But of course this process is not innocent. The extension of a pervasive security
apparatus, anti-Islamic hate crimes, and even foreign wars are enabled by the ways in
which these representations appear to beg for a response.
In light of this politics of representation, what I found particularly interesting in
Rowena Easton’s spoken choir performance “!” [Hollywood Blues] was the way in
which it offered an alternative mode of staging ‘major events’. Rather than providing
another narrative through which the sense of the event is established, “!” [Hollywood
Blues] explores the complex and disorienting processes through which the disaster
is written. In what follows, I would like firstly to distinguish the structure of this
performance from those which we, as spectators, have become accustomed to
receiving of ‘major events’. In particular, I would like to suggest that this structure is
better attuned to the complex processes underlying the co-evolution of disasters and
societies in their emergence. In the final section, I would like to briefly discuss some
questions which this performance may raise in the fields of disaster response, the
social sciences, and politics more broadly defined.
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