The Relationship between Musical Performance and Curating: A case Study on Hamilton.
by Lara Machado
Introduction
A fairly recent initiative in museums has been to branch out into other mediums, requiring curators to innovate their discourse and practice. This essay will focus on the relationship between musical theatre performance and curation, and what they can learn from each other. These apparently distant fields have several aspects in common, and there is space to build a bridge between them. In order to do so, this essay will briefly define musical theatre, explore similarities between musicals and curation and analyse the musical Hamilton as a case study. This musical has innovated the genre by its chosen narrative perspective, critical commentary and adaptation of social constructs. Leaning from this, how can curators address other mediums and dominant narratives, and hopefully change them?
Musical Theatre and its Relevance
According to theatre historian John Kenrick, a musical is ‘…a stage, television, or film production utilizing popular style songs to either tell a story or to showcase the talents of writers and/or performers, with dialogue optional.’ (2010, p.14) It is composed of the following elements: music and lyrics, a book (the script), choreography, staging (all stage movement) and physical production (design of the show and technical aspects) (Kenrick, 2010). All those aspects combine to serve the main purpose: to tell a story in a compelling way and to evoke emotional and intellectual responses from the audience.
To summarise its history, musical theatre can trace its roots back to rituals of prehistoric humankind (Kenrick, 2010). Its most well-known iteration appeared in Paris during the 1840s, and its more contemporary format is in the experience of Broadway and the American musicals (Figure 1), which rose in popularity during the twentieth century, becoming the primary source for musical entertainment (Kenrick, 2010). In terms of musical theatre, Broadway is currently the most recognisable area, with London’s West End following as a close second. Besides directly boosting the economies of both cities, musical theatre is responsible for attracting many visitors, mainly tourists, to the local area. In New York City, for example, the 2018–2019 Broadway season welcomed 14.8 million admissions, in which 65% of those attendances were made by tourists (The Broadway League, 2019).
Musicals are often perceived as ‘frivolous’, ‘flashy’ or ‘detached from reality’, but they are an important sector of the entertainment industry. According to Mercer (2018), musicals are ‘…educational, art and current.’ They are created with audiences in mind and many of them attempt to reflect on pressing issues. The productions can focus on current times or reflect on important historic moments, such as how the events that followed the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were represented in Come From Away (2017). Musicals can also provide commentary on societal issues, such as the hardships faced by immigrants in West Side Story (1957) or the gender inequalities and domestic violence portrayed in Waitress (2016). In addition, more contemporary musicals, like Dear Evan Hansen (2016), touch on extremely relevant issues for today’s society, for instance, social media, mental health and taboo topics such as suicide.
Musical theatre is a multidisciplinary, educational and collaborative art form, and it attempts to accompany the changes its audiences go through. A similar definition can be applied to the current role of curators, even if musicals and curation seem distant from one another. Visitors of museums and other art institutions also desire depth and meaning in what is offered, because today’s ways of living and human relationships are becoming progressively more complex.
Musical Theatre and Curating: Building a Bridge
Nowadays, museums are increasingly crossing media borders and becoming more than places to house collections. Curators are branching out to offer more than exhibitions, especially through public programming. As a consequence, it becomes necessary to look outside of art institutions into other innovative practices in order to conduct such multidisciplinary endeavours. Nowadays, visitors want more than products or services; they want to experience something memorable, in what is known as experience economy (Pine II and Gilmore, 1998). According to Pine II and Gilmore (1998), current economic value progressed to the staging of experiences, which gives a differentiated encounter to visitors and new importance to what businesses offer. As a result, curators want to impact their audiences and encourage critical reflection, whilst creating more unique experiences. In this sense, museums behave a lot like theatres, with an ever-changing programme of activities designed with the attracting of new visitors in mind.
According to sociologist Nathalie Heinich (2009), from the 1970s onwards, there has been a shift from simply artworks being exhibited to the exhibition in itself being a type of discourse. As a consequence, this new understanding was extended to the role of curators as well, in which they moved from ‘carers’ of collections to authors, acquiring greater visibility (Heinich, 2009). Nowadays, curators create narratives around a certain topic and use objects and other displays to illustrate these stories. As a parallel, theatre is all about the narrative as well, in which set design, costume, character design, light design and so on aid the telling of the story. In musical theatre specifically, there are all the aforementioned elements and also music and lyrics.
There have been successful intersections between curation and musicals. For example, Sun & Sea (Marina), one of the most visited performances and winner of the Golden Lion from the 58th Venice Biennale (Figure 2). It was curated by Lucia Pietroiusti, the curator of public programmes at the Serpentine Galleries. The Pavilion operated as an indoor opera about climate change, where performers would be singing about a day on the beach whilst tackling very mundane aspects. It was a performance about laziness and the inaction that mankind has towards environmental issues, which will eventually lead to our doom. The performance was supposed to show a contemporary crisis slowly unravelling, like ‘…a pop song on the very last day on Earth.’ (Halperin, 2019)
Many people find it difficult to watch characters who will start singing at any point because that is not how ‘reality’ works. According to Taylor (2012), musical theatre relies heavily on the ideas of suspension of disbelief and songs distance audiences, making them aware of the musical atmosphere whilst feeling the emotions. This leads to an abandonment of logic and an acceptance in the surreal for the sake of entertainment. The artificiality of characters bursting into song protects audiences from feeling too deeply, and the combination of musical elements would help them to retain levels of separation from the characters. However, in Sun & Sea (Marina), the characters are us. Due to its operatic nature and absence of dialogue, the performance works on its precise proximity of our reality. It is so subtle and mundane that it makes climate change scarier; a big problem happening while humanity calmly spends a day singing on the beach. Visitors could also take part in the production, being able to lay on the beach alongside the performers, and they could also bring kids and pets along (Halperin, 2019).
Live works exist in the ephemeral and their power and possibilities reside in their certain impermanence (Giannachi and Westerman, 2017). However, the very strength of performance can present many hardships. The liveness and dependence on human actors proved to be a problem for budget and regularity during the programme in the biennale. Instead of being easy-to-include objects, performances act as networks of provocations and they question art-making in the first place. Live works have the power to question and expose the own infrastructure of institutions, altering time and space and the relation with the public (Giannachi and Westerman, 2017).
Case Study: Hamilton
Hamilton is a musical created by Lin Manuel Miranda, who wrote the music, lyrics and book, and that debuted on Broadway in 2015 (Churchwell, 2016). Adapted from a bibliography, it tells the story of Alexander Hamilton, one of the less known founding fathers of the United States of America. Since its debut, the musical became a cultural phenomenon, an undeniable box office hit and it won every theatrical award, Grammy awards and even the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
One of its great triumphs was giving a contemporary twist to distant historical facts and making them approachable, bringing history alive through the sound of rap. The musical does not simple stage the American Revolution, it continues it to the present day. According to Churchwell:
“Hamilton fuses American history with current politics, using a soundtrack of American popular music and one of the most inventive librettos ever written. The result is that nearly every song in the show works as a complex historical concert, layering musical pasts with the musical present, just as the historical past mingles with the political present” (Churchwell, 2016).
According to Kenrick, a great musical has the following elements: ‘intelligence, emotional content and appeal and the courage to do something in a new way’; all of those elements must combine to generate a fourth: ‘audience excitement’ (2010, p.16). Hamilton gives audiences a deep understanding and connection with its main character, taking them through an emotional journey. The casting of the show is courageous, choosing an almost entirely non-white cast (Figure 3) to portray the founding fathers of the USA. It is also important to underline the political scenario of the time of its creation and debut on Broadway. President Barack Obama (America’s first black president) was finishing his mandate and Donald Trump was running for president, campaigning with sexist, nationalist and anti-immigrant allegations.
Hamilton is a complex body of work which could be analysed from many different angles. For this essay, the focus will be on the narrative created, which is also one of the main tasks of the curator’s role when curating an exhibition, a festival, a programme and so on. In Hamilton, the narrative brings history alive through its performance and tells a dominant story through the lenses of the oppressed. According to opera and theatre director Yuval Sharon (2019), using the term narrative, when applied to history, gives people the power to reframe the status quo, which can be a revolutionary act. Bringing history closer to fiction frames dominant narratives as a choice that people in power make to justify their control and that populations internalise as the norm. In order to build a new social identity, the narratives told need to be transformed.
The narrative is one of the main strengths of Hamilton. Miranda exposes the fundamental issues of contemporary American culture through lyrical references, placing and style of the songs and the way he tells the story of Alexander Hamilton, whilst condensing heavy topics such as battles, slavery, political cabinet meetings and so on. Sharon (2019) describes three ways in which conventional narratives can be disrupted: by changing the storyteller, changing the content of the narrative and changing the way the story is told, resisting conventional structures.
Firstly, regarding the storyteller, this task in Hamilton belongs to Aaron Burr, another forgotten founding father, because he shot Alexander Hamilton and became a villain, historically. The central character of the narrative is also changed: Hamilton is not one of the most celebrated founding fathers and he is described in the musical as a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and immigrant. Lin Manuel Miranda himself descends from Puerto Rican immigrants. Besides subverting the storyteller and main character, both actors are respectively black and Latino (Figure 4).
Secondly, regarding the change in the content of the narrative, Sharon (2019) claims that the confinement of traditional narrative structure needs to change so that silenced stories or new perspectives have more power. In Hamilton, for example, the revolutionary war is filtered through the eyes of an immigrant. Moreover, the women of the revolutionary period are also more highlighted. In songs such as The Schuyler Sisters (Figure 5), Lin Manuel Miranda (2015) exposed how the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which was written during the American Revolution, did not consider women and the need for their inclusion in political matters. However, changing only narrative content can be a limiting aspect, because without changing the traditional format, it might still reaffirm hegemonic cultures.
Despite Hamilton’s undeniable success, some criticise that casting people of colour to play historical white figures doesn’t discontinue prejudice or ideas on the meaning of race (Gordon-Reed, 2016). The lack of black historical figures is not resolved by the casting of black and Latino actors. In fact, the musical does soften important topics such as slavery (Alexander Hamilton wasn’t so committed to the abolition of slavery as the musical suggests) and doesn’t depict black people from the time of the Revolutionary period (Gordon-Reed, 2016). Some critics say that it forces people of colour to portray a historical narrative that did not consider these communities, while others say that Hamilton gives America a new origin story. The telling of mainstream narratives, such as the American Revolution, could be reaffirming the dominant status quo and affirming mainstream American ideologies, such as the American dream, the American way of life, and so on.
Thirdly, regarding changing the format in which the story is told, Sharon (2019) affirms the importance to resist traditional narrative structures, to break what is ‘normally correct’. If new formats are stimulated, new ways of thinking can emerge. Instead of considering musicals or even curation imprisoned on their format, their notions can be expanded to more than music, more than display, more than theatre and so on. For example, Hamilton innovates by narrating a white mainstream history through rap, a rebellious style, and in doing so, opening new perspectives. Although rap and hip-hop are considered very popular, they are a product of marginal realities, oppressed communities and are still considered subculture (Churchwell, 2016). This style of music is especially rare for Broadway notions of traditional musicals. Hamilton also reaches its audience through its usage of contemporary popular music, such as R&B, hip-hop, brit-pop, and so on. There are also many pop culture references, such as films, ‘slangs’ and even references from other musicals.
It is important to highlight that some historical facts were adapted or ignored for the purpose of entertainment, coherence and critical commentary. One example is the omission of a few historical facts, such as The Schuyler Sisters having brothers. Contemporary curators could possibly borrow this approach more easily, but it would be highly difficult for curators working with history museums, in which accuracy is highly valued. After all, Hamilton is a work of historical fiction, based on reality but greatly condensed and revised. According to Churchwell (2016), ‘Miranda creates a myth for Hamilton by celebrating him as a symbol of immigrant inclusiveness, egalitarianism and meritocracy: historically it’s a stretch, but theatrically it’s genius.’
Hamilton talks about issues such as immigrant inclusiveness, gender unbalance, political legacy, marginalised communities and so on. It raises thoughts about the US today, whilst it entertains. The show is also very aware and reflective of itself, being metalinguistic in its narrative, music, book and so on (Churchwell, 2016). The overall message of the show is that America’s past and future belong to men and women of colour as much as to anyone else, a historical, cultural and political narrative of inclusion. In this sense, theatre provides the platform for culture to be re-evaluated through story-telling and, hopefully, a place to imagine and construct other social realities (Sharon, 2019).
What Can Curation Learn from This?
Considering recent discourse on complex topics such as decoloniality, rethinking the way history is told has become a key factor for building new social identities. Museums have a key role in this, as they are spaces for knowledge exchange, critical reflection, preservation of history and so on. It is necessary to understand which stories they have been telling, why, if they should keep telling them and in which format.
Sharon (2019) frames theatre as ‘…a machine of self-reflection.’ Through this case study, it is possible to understand that curators can learn and apply a lot of new approaches into their medium. Curators are very associated with the concepts they create and their narratives can be disrupted by changing the storyteller, the content and the conventional formats, like previously described (Sharon, 2019). For example, curators can create self-aware narratives about the act of curation, which already involves a selection of works that are ‘most ideal’ to illustrate a theme (and automatically there is a distinction between what is selected or not).
Regarding the role of the curator, a new kind of curatorial practice is emerging, drawing from performance experience: the ‘curator-producer’. According to Goldberg (2016), the curator of the future will be a hybrid, an intersection between multidisciplinary media. Curators will have to work through a wide variety of mediums, translating work for audiences. Mixing contemporary culture and history, they will tackle several new tasks that belonged prior to art historians, producers, managers and various kinds of innovative thinking (Goldberg, 2016).
Another welcome innovation would be to disrupt dominant narratives to showcase hidden perspectives. The museum sector could be more diverse and non-hegemonic, both in topics, artists to display and even museum staff. According to Ragbir (2020), a Mellon Foundation 2015 study shows that museums lack diversity both in staff and audiences and they do not reflect the current US demographic. Museums have white leaderships, predominantly, and this reflects into visitors also being mainly white. Another study conducted at Williams College showed that, despite recent efforts, ‘…85,4% of the works in collections of all major US museums belong to white artists, and 87,4% are by men.’ (Bishara, 2019)
In order to address this, there could be more initiatives towards commissioning and acquiring work for permanent collections from black female artists and hiring black museum staff in major institutions. Hiring more black and female curators in major institutions would aid the creation of new narratives and exploration of their positionality as a historically marginalised group and, as a consequence, attracting more diverse visitors. It is simply not enough to talk about oppressed communities or invite them to take part in public programming; they need to be in leadership positions, choosing how to narrate their stories. Hamilton, for instance, transformed musicals on increasing diversity. The casting in Hamilton derives from different races and ethnicities, in which these actors probably received fewer chances due to typecasting. As a consequence, Hamilton was responsible for half of the actors of colour nominations for Broadway performance in 2016 (Soloski, 2016).
Another interesting thing that curators can take away from Hamilton is the use of popular culture to draw audiences in. Hamilton does it through its music styles, but it does not underestimate the fans. The show has also been encouraging younger American theatergoers to engage more with their own history in school. Many people felt inspired to research on the topic after they have been to the show or heard the soundtrack and a lot of history teachers have been using the soundtrack as an innovative educational tool (Mercer, 2018).
Conclusions
Considering the new endeavours curators are partaking of, it becomes vital to look into other fields for inspiration. In its critical commentary of culture and history, Hamilton provides great insight into a work that crosses media and addresses new societal complexities. The musical theatre experience overall proves to be relevant for curators, because they will need to branch outside of museums and provide content, interpretation and guidance towards their new multimedia initiatives, whilst properly communicating with and attracting visitors. The way in which those professionals can create narratives is now a crossmedia decision; they have the choice to not reaffirm dominant discourse, holding a responsibility for the stories we choose to tell and protect for the future.
REFERENCES
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Di Giovanni, S. (2019) How to get Broadway Rush Tickets in NYC. Available at: https://nypost.com/2019/08/09/how-to-get-broadway-rush-tickets-in-nyc/ (Accessed: 20 April 2020).
Figure 2: Khong, E. L. (2019) How a Beach Opera at the 58th Venice Biennale Quietly Contends with Climate Change Catastrophe. Available at: https://frieze.com/article/how-beach-opera-58th-venice-biennale-quietly-contends-climate-change-catastrophe (Accessed: 21 April 2020).
Figure 3: Gordon-Reed, A. (2016) The intense debates surrounding Hamilton don’t diminish the musical — they enrich it. Available at: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/9/13/12894934/hamilton-debates-history-race-politics-literature (Accessed: 21 April 2020).
Figure 4: Armwood ll, J. H. (2016) “Hamilton” and the Books That Hamilton Held — The New Yorker. Available at: http://www.armwoodopinion.com/2016/06/hamilton-and-books-that-hamilton-held.html (Accessed: 21 April 2020).
Figure 5: Hamilton Wiki (2016) The Schuyler Sisters. Available at: https://hamiltonmusical.fandom.com/wiki/The_Schuyler_Sisters (Accessed: 21 April 2020).
About the author:
Lara Machado is a Brazilian designer studying at the MA Curating Contemporary Design at Kingston University funded with a Chevening Scholarship, the UK government’s international awards programme aimed at developing global leaders. She was previously awarded a study abroad scholarship for the BA Design at Goldsmiths — University of London. She believes in design as a critical and multidisciplinary subject and a tool for reflection and change. Besides having worked with design in various contexts and as an Art Director, she is also very passionate about feminism, performance, and musical theatre.
