BEYOND REPRESENTATION: PERFORMANCE ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE RESEARCH

AND PRESENTATION OF CULTURES AT THE SMITHSONIAN FOLKLIFE FESTIVAL

Leah Bush

AMST857

May 10, 2016

Bush 2

The importance of folklife festivals in contemporary culture as well as museum

scholarship lies in the festival’s ability to become a site for the exploration of cultural

representation and negotiation of identities within a liminal, transformative space. Olivia

Cadaval, curator at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH) at the Smithsonian

Institution describes a festival as a realm of freedom and equality where people can defy,

transform, and offer alternatives to rules and structures.1 Yet the politics of festivals are

inherently tied into the power structures which shape contemporary society and have shaped

museum spaces. The politics of museum exhibitions derive from a historically unequal power

relationship between the West and other cultures. When contextualized as museum exhibitions,

folklife festivals can place ideological power and control in the hands of organizers and curators

in a manner similar to Tony Bennett’s conception of the exhibitionary complex: a set of civic

institutions which emerged in the 19th century, were linked through shared practices of

representation, and encouraged “new forms of civil self-fashioning on the part of newly

enfranchised democratic cities.”2 Museums and cultural institutions functioned as part of the

nation-state to discipline and control the public by winning their “hearts and minds,”3 and the

primary role of the museum in public culture was to disseminate knowledge and educate the

masses.

1 Olivia Cadaval, Creating a Latino Identity in the Nation’s Capital: The Latino Festival (New York: Routledge, 1998), 7.

2 Tony Bennett, quoted in Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Exhibitionary Complexes,” in Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, edited by Ivan Karp (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006), 35.

3 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), n.p.

Bush 3Over the past few decades, the ideological shift in museology has moved towards

breaking down the colonial gaze through the sharing of curatorial authority with the communities

being studied. Janet Marstine describes this as a “post-museum” paradigm, where the museum

articulates and continually re-evaluates its agendas, strategies, and decision-making processes in

a way that acknowledges the historical power imbalance in museum scholarship, and actively

seeks to share power with the communities the museum studies and serves.4 One purpose of this

“new museology” (which is also known as critical museum theory) is to avoid the

essentialization and objectification of cultures. Ideally, the museum can become a source of and

catalyst for social change. Museums - and festivals - can be sources to disrupt existing

institutional narratives and decode the underlying value systems beneath.

But how can this disruption be accomplished in a folklife festival context? When applied

to folklife festivals, moving beyond the “exhibitionary complex” towards a self-reflexive and

collaborative approach to museum scholarship requires engagement between festival curators,

participants in the festival, and visitors. The dialogic approach of the Smithsonian Center for

Folklife and Cultural Heritage engages with collaboration through forms of multi-directional

communication between these parties which the Center terms “cultural conversations” or

“curatorial conversations.” Curator Richard Kennedy writes that CFCH curators serve as

moderators in the development of Festival programming,5 and this paper and practicum project

examine how CFCH curators research and present performances at the Smithsonian Folklife

Festival in ways which share curatorial authority, involve audience participation, and are

4 Janet Marstine, Introduction to New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction, ed. Janet Marstine (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), 19.

5 Richard Kennedy, “West Meets East: Asian Programs at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival,” Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, eds. Olivia Cadaval, Sojin Kim, and Diana Baird N’Diaye (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, forthcoming), 86.

Bush 4attentive to the ethics of representation through principles of performance ethnography. I

examine two questions: How is the Festival researched and staged, and how do these processes

interact with principles of performance ethnography? What types of performances happen at the

Festival, and do they embody performance ethnography?

Methodologies

I use mixed methodology research to examine these questions. This project is based on

research processes I observed while working under Sojin Kim on the Sounds of California

Festival program; unstructured interviews I performed with CFCH archivist Jeff Place, who

curated the 2003 Appalachia: Heritage and Harmony program, and CFCH research associate

and musician Mark Puryear, who has been affiliated with the Festival as an artist, a presenter,

and most recently, a curator for the 2011 program Rhythm and Blues: Tell It Like It Is; and

extended informal conversations with curators Olivia Cadaval and Sojin Kim. I incorporate

archival material from audio recordings of fieldwork interviews with Festival participants, and

workshop and narrative sessions at the Festival. Finally, I incorporate internal materials from

CFCH guides for fieldwork researchers and Festival presenters, and scholarship from the

forthcoming anthology Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Representation and the Smithsonian

Folklife Festival.

Performance Ethnography

As a method of inquiry that privileges the body as a site of knowing, performance

ethnography differs from the ethnography of performance, a methodology which examines

cultural performances as objects of investigation.6 The goal of performance ethnography is to

6 Ronald J. Pelias, “Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, “Performance Ethnography,” Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007, doi: 10.1111/b.9781405124331.2007.x (accessed February 29, 2016).

Bush 5shift from conceptualizing ethnography as a top-down enterprise involving the observing of

culture from an outside perspective which replicates the colonial gaze towards a form of

embodied knowledge which does not rely on textually based materials. Textual materials can be

part of a field of power relations which elevates the value of text over the value of non-verbal,

performative interactions, both in everyday life and on the performance stage. According to

Douglas Farrer, placing an emphasis “on the body, embodied practice and performance, eschews

the colonial logocentric emphasis placed upon text to the exclusion of embodied practice and the

cultural conditioning of the body, to consider the application and agency of the body.”7

Performance ethnography pushes past the connection made by Renato Rosaldo of the “eye of

ethnography” to the “I of imperialism,”8 echoing the concerns of new museology: how can

curators research and present cultures in festival settings in ways which share curatorial authority

and avoid the objectification of cultures?

Performance ethnography generally involves staging the ethnographer’s fieldwork

experiences in a performance setting, and this project shifts the framework from ethnographer to

curator and Festival presenter. Through an analysis of her 2001 performance installation

“Searching for Osun,” Joni L. Jones lays out six principles of performance ethnography which

build on the ideas that “identity and daily interactions are a series of conscious and unconscious

choices improvised within culturally and socially specific guidelines, and that people learn

through participation.”9 Jones’s principles provide a useful lens from which to investigate

7 Douglas Farrer, “The Perils and Pitfalls of Performance Ethnography,” International Sociological Association E-Bulletin, March 2007, 22.

8 Quoted in Dwight Conquergood, “Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics,” Communication Monographs 58, no. 2 (June 1, 1991), 183.

9 Joni L. Jones, “Performance Ethnography: The Role of Embodiment in Cultural Authenticity,” Theatre Topics 12, no. 1 (2002): 7.

Bush 6relational performance at the Festival as they parallel the goal of the CFCH to create “curatorial

conversations” through the Festival.

1. Staging performances around a central idea or question which constitutes the performance’s context

2. Growing as a collaboration between ethnographer and community to create accountability

3. Remaining conscious of the ethnographer’s subjectivity

4. Incorporating multivocality to mitigate the ethnographer’s authority

5. Incorporating audience participation

6. Being attentive to the ethics of representation

Contextualizing and Critiquing the Folklife Festival

As a celebration of living cultures which is produced by a national cultural institution, the

Festival is a particularly rich resource for understanding the roles and applications of

performance ethnography within museological settings. Richard Bauman and Patricia Sawin

write that “the conduct of a folklife festival is a political field in its own right, though with

significant links to larger political arenas,”10 and the politics of festival performance are shaped

by the tension between governmental and private interests which undergirds neoliberal society.

The ethics of representation (which I contextualize in this paper as the representation of Festival

participants by curators and presenters, not the self-representation of Festival participants) is

intertwined with the location of a museum. The Festival’s politically charged location on the

10 Richard Bauman and Patricia Sawin, “The Politics of Participation in Folklife Festivals,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 1991), 290.

Bush 7Mall lends the Festival an innate gravitas and curatorial responsibility not present in a small

community organized gathering or festival.

Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement11 and located on the National Mall, the annual

Folklife Festival began in 1967 as the Festival of American Folklife and was revolutionary in its

effort to democratize museum practices. Implemented by field research director and

documentarian Ralph Rinzler as a corrective measure to the narrow representation of history and

culture presented in the Smithsonian museums,12 the Festival was conceived as a “living museum

without walls,”13 and has strived since its inception to move beyond an exhibitionary complex

style of presentation towards an inclusive, “cultural conversation”14 which reimagines power

relationships between curators and Festival participants. The Smithsonian uses a range of

language - such as “cultural practitioners, bearers or exemplars”15 when discussing participants to

emphasize that they are active agents in the Festival and part of the multidirectional cultural

exchange between participants, visitors, and curators.

The CFCH uses an expansive definition of folklore when developing Festival

programming; the Festival is not about presenting cultures which may first appear “foreign” and

11 Olivia Cadaval and Cristina Diaz-Carrera, “The Smithsonian Folklife Festival and Cultural Heritage Policy in Colombia: A Case Study,” Curator 57, no. 4 (October 2014): 426.

12 Richard Kurin, “Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Museological Perspective,” Curator 57, no. 4 (October 2014), 409.

13 Richard Bauman and Patricia Sawin, “The Politics of Participation in Folklife Festivals,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine ( Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 1991), 289.

14 Cadaval, “Imagining a Collaborative Curatorial Relationship: A Reordering of Authority over Representation,” in Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Heritage Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, eds. Olivia Cadaval, Sojin Kim, and Diana Baird N’Diaye (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, forthcoming).

15 Kurin, 407.

Bush 8“other” to the visitors on the Mall, or regard cultural traditions as static and unchanging. Each

Festival usually has three separate programs which can have local, regional, or national foci and

do not have to be related to each other; programs as diverse as Bhutan: Land of the Thunder

Dragon and NASA: Fifty Years and Beyond have occurred during the same year. According to

the Presenter’s Guide, an internal CFCH document given to presenters at each Festival, the

immediate goals of the Festival are to “honor the participants and cultural groups they represent

through display of their traditional arts, skills, and knowledge; and to make the broader public

aware of the rich variety of cultural traditions, the value of cultural diversity and continuity, and

the obstacles impinging on traditional cultural practices.”16

Scholarship produced by Festival curators and affiliated scholars is largely celebratory in

nature, portraying the Festival as a unique site of enrichment and multidirectional education.

There is no singular narrative behind the Festival or strict set of guidelines for research and

production; scholarship produced by the CFCH reflects the mix of viewpoints, opinions, and

experiences of individual curators. Baron describes the Festival curator’s role as a type of

mediation which has “invented, elaborated, and refined” framing practices where “cultural

practitioners can present and discourse about their culture on their own terms, rather than appear

before the objectifying gaze of an audience as objects on display.”17 Cadaval writes that the

Festival is a process for cultural construction which creates “living stories” and opportunities for

“reimagining identities and social relationships within, but not limited to Festival-framed time

16 Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Presenter’s Guide: 2000 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, 2000. The presenter’s guide has generally remained the same from year to year.

17 Robert Baron, “Prologue: Mediating and Intermediating at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival,” in Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Heritage Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, edited by Olivia Cadaval, Sojin Kim, and Diana Baird N’Diaye (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, forthcoming), 14.

Bush 9and space.”18 The Festival is considered so influential in the museum community that the entirety

of the October 2014 issue of Curator consisted of a series of articles written by Festival curators

celebrating the gains that the Festival has made in moving towards being a hybrid event which

places primacy on the voices of cultural practitioners through demonstrations of folkloric

artistry, craftsmanship, and public performance.

However, the Festival has been critiqued on the grounds that it objectifies participants in

a manner similar to the exhibitionary complex where audiences visually consume “exotic”

participants. Anthropologists Richard Price and Sally Price, who were presenters at the 1992

Festival program Creativity and Resistance: Maroon Cultures in America, argue that the Festival

framework objectifies performers by presenting them in a living diorama akin to a zoo, and

equate the Festival’s stages to animal cages.19 Price and Price questioned the appropriateness of

displaying peoples’ work routines, religions, and cultural expressions for the amusement and

recreation of others,20 suggesting that the Festival appropriates cultures, and that curators’ efforts

to create cultural conversations are ultimately insufficient. Robert Cantwell expresses similar

concerns over the objectification of participants in Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the

Representation of Culture, arguing that the Festival contributes to socially ingrained stereotypes

that Festival visitors may have about participants and their cultures, using stereotypes to make

sense of the overwhelming Festival experience.21

18 Cadaval, “Imagining a Collaborative Curatorial Relationship: A Reordering of Authority Over Representation,” 158.

19 Richard Price and Sally Price, On the Mall: Presenting Maroon Tradition-Bearers at the 1992 FAF (Bloomington, IN: Folklore Institute, Indiana University, 1994), 50-51. The Prices presented at the Festival specifically to start a critical dialogue about the Folklife Festival, and On the Mall is a very detailed and highly critical account of their experiences which emphasizes the logistical disorganization of that year’s programming.

20 Ibid., 89.

21 Cantwell, paraphrased in Thompson, 99.

Bush 10One way in which the CFCH attempts to distinguish the Festival from exhibitionary

complex styles of presentation is through the use of presenters, who are often the scholars who

conduct field research for the Festival. As a cultural intermediary, the presenter’s role is to

enhance participants’ presentations at the Festival and facilitate their communication with the

audience.22 Presenters verbally construct the interpretive frames through which participants can

be understood by visitors. Thus, the presenter’s role is also a type of performance. However,

Krista Thompson has critiqued Festival presenters as being sometimes ineffectual and

antithetical to the Festival experience. Thompson writes that visitors become “seduced by the

sights and sounds of the event and overlook the less spectacular verbal performances of the

presenters.”23 The overall spectacle of the Festival can hold primacy over the messages - both

overt (the literal text of the presenter’s speech) and implied (messages of appreciating the value

of culture and heritage) - promoted by the Festival itself.

Festival Curation and Performance Ethnography

Festival Research and Production

The Festival is curated in two phases: research and production.24 The research phase

includes the selection of cultural areas and themes, field research and documentation, evaluation

of findings, and follow-up research. As each Festival program develops in different contexts with

22 Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Presenter’s Guide: 2000 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, 2000.

23 Krista A. Thompson, “Beyond Tarzan and National Geographic: The Politics and Poetics of Presenting African Diasporic Cultures on the Mall,” The Journal of American Folklore 121, no. 479 (Winter 2008): 98-99.

24 Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Folklife Festival: Research Guidelines, 2012.

Bush 11different themes, research processes are malleable, and multiple research models have been

created and are refined for the specific needs of each program.

Developing Themes

Ideas, not collections of objects, are at the core of critical museum theory and

performance ethnography. According to Marstine, “the idea has become more important than the

object”25 in museums which embrace new museology and the Festival is composed of multiple

cultural narratives. Jones writes that “the idea or the question constitutes the context for the

performance,”26 and the Festival is designed around multiple themes which evolve out of the

narratives that the Festival tells.27 Identifying themes is a team effort which comes from the

curatorial team composed of a combination of Smithsonian staff and cultural expertise from

outside the institution. In an interview with the author, CFCH Research Associate Mark Puryear

describes the Festival’s thematic approach as a form of opening doors for connections.

We capture themes hoping that the participants and the general public can connect in a more meaningful way than just audience and performer [or] performer - audience - presenter. I think this is something that’s fairly unique and consistent with the Smithsonian Folklife Festival is that we don’t try to create such a big partition between the participants and the visitors… there’s a chance for conversation outside of a presentation or staged program… there’s less barriers to people just walking up to a participant and starting a conversation about something that might interest them.28

Specific ideas and themes are also evident in the built environment of the Festival, which breaks

away from the traditional concert environment which separates the audience from distant

25Marstine, 28.

26 Jones, 8.

27 Jeff Place, interview with the author, Washington, D.C., March 1, 2016.

28 Mark Puryear, interview with the author, Washington, D.C., March 8, 2016.

Bush 12performances on a raised stage. This built environment also arguably expresses Jones’ principles

of attentiveness to the ethics of representation, and community collaboration, by developing the

staging in consultation with participants, and by grounding presentations in contexts customarily

used for practicing traditions in home communities.29 Individual stages are designed to replicate

home environments, a model which was developed by Festival founder Ralph Rinzler to promote

the message that the traditions being represented are “contemporary and alive.”30 Stages are

named based on the program theme, and can be set up thematically; for example, the two main

stages of the 2003 Appalachia: Heritage and Harmony program, co-curated by archivist Jeff

Place, were named after the program theme: “Heritage,” which featured a mixture of narrative

sessions, and “Harmony,” a stage for large musical acts. A smaller stage designed like a cabin

front porch featured acoustic music and narrative sessions in a quieter environment, and the

storyteller’s tent, was shared with the Mali program.31 The main stage for the upcoming 2016

Sounds of California program is being designed to simulate the environment of a house party

where DJs would perform.

However, the stages designed to replicate the participants’ home environments have been

critiqued for creating a spectacle or diorama-like situation. Price and Price continually compare

the Festival to nineteenth-century world’s fairs, finding the efforts of the CFCH to create context

through the Festival’s built environment ultimately futile. Asking participants to “pretend they

are back home” while speaking through a microphone and waiting for a presenter to translate

29 Baron, 16.

30 Jack Santino, “What I Learned from Ralph Rinzler: The Politics and Poetics of Public Presentation,” in Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Heritage Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, edited by Olivia Cadaval, Sojin Kim, and Diana Baird N’Diaye (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, forthcoming), 35.

31 Place, interview.

Bush 13“can only produce a charade”32 which does not approximate participants’ real life experiences.

This tension between the CFCH perspective of viewing a recreation of the home environment as

contextualization for visitors versus Price and Price’s perspective of the recreation of the home

environment as a form of objectification is not easily resolved, and may ultimately depend on the

researcher’s academic background and personal viewpoint on the presentation of living cultures.

Choosing and Collaborating with Cultural Practitioners

The importance of community collaboration within performance ethnography is a way

for the ethnographer/curator to remain accountable to the fieldwork community.33 As

representatives of a national institution, CFCH curators are placed in positions of authority which

raise issues of replicating the unequal power structures historically embedded in museums and

collections. In order to rectify this, CFCH research processes are designed to be collaborative

with the communities participating in the Festival. Curator Sojin Kim describes her research

process as “doing outreach” instead of “doing fieldwork,”34 which implies that the goal of

research is to collaborate with Festival participants on programs and greater cultural initiatives

rather than simply collect data on other cultures. Similarly, curator Diana Baird N’Diaye refers to

the collaborative process of working with communities specifically directed towards social

change as “inreach,” which involves forming partnerships around projects which explore

communities’ own identity-defining cultural expressions.35 These partnerships and larger

32 Price and Price, 36.

33 Jones, 8.

34 Sojin Kim, discussion with the author, Washington, D.C.

35 Diana Baird N’Diaye, “Agency, Reciprocal Engagement, Applied Folklore Practice,” Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, forthcoming), 278.

Bush 14initiatives somewhat de-center the role of the Smithsonian as a governmental entity holding

ultimate curatorial authority, such as during the Will to Adorn program, part of a larger project

on African-American social dress and identity, where the CFCH created a social network

research platform that continues to be a resource for exchange among partners and contributors.36

Students and community-based researchers received orientation and training in digital archiving

and publicly shared their research through Smithsonian-hosted online conferences, video

documentation of Will to Adorn events, blogs related to ethnographic fieldwork, and photo

documentation. By centering the needs of the community and using their institutional resources

to support community development, the CFCH remains accountable to the cultural practitioners

in the Festival.37

Participant selection plays a critical role in how the Festival unfolds, and the CFCH has a

particular profile in mind when choosing performers. During research for the 2011 Colombia

Festival, research staff created a profile for the “personaje Smithsonian”: an individual with

multiple skills who could provide a holistic sense of Colombian culture.38 As background

research for the Festival, the CFCH partners with fieldworkers and researchers to seek and

identify key participants who are knowledgeable in the selected cultural tradition or Festival

theme. The CFCH Research Guidelines provided to fieldworkers functions as a guide to best

practices, encourages transparency between researchers and communities, and details the

recommendations for selecting participants.

36 Ibid., 289.

37 I acknowledge that this deep level of community involvement and engagement may not always be as practical for international programs than for the locally based Will to Adorn.

38 Olivia Cadaval and Cristina Diaz-Carrera, “The Smithsonian Folklife Festival and Cultural Heritage Policy in Colombia: A Case Study,” Curator: The Museum Journal 57 no. 4 (October 2014): 423-426. doi: 10.1111/cura.12083

Bush 15Criteria to be considered in recommending particular communities and practices for the Festival include: Is it a tradition distinctive or closely identified with the Festival program’s theme, or reflective of group/community identity; Does it have artistic content; and does it lend itself to be presented at an outdoor Festival?

Consider carefully the advisability of staging a community’s rituals: Are practitioners willing to do it or would it be disrespectful to present in a secular setting? Are there restrictions about who is allowed to watch? Will it be an embarrassingly ersatz version? What are the needs in space and time? Are there aspects that will offend public sensibilities or strengthen stereotypes?39

These research guidelines mix the practicality of staging a massive Festival with the

aforementioned concerns of new museology. The CFCH is attentive to the needs and desires of

the participants and their cultural traditions as part of the participant selection process. The

CFCH approach to the ethnographic interview combines generalized oral history techniques

gathering information about participants’ lives while questioning artists about their creative

processes and the societal context of their work. When interviewing Chicano musicians Agustín

Lira and Patricia Wells of the California-based musical group Agustín Lira and Alma, CFCH

director Daniel Sheehy primarily posed open-ended questions: “Can we talk about the genesis of

[your former group] Teatro Campesino - could you talk about memories and stories? I think it’s

helpful for others to know that’s what you’re writing about and all kinds of other levels of

meaning.”40 This type of questioning allowed Agustín and Patricia to elaborate at length about

their lives and stories.

Curatorial Challenges

39 Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Folklife Festival: Research Guidelines.

40 Daniel Sheehy, Interview with Agustín Lira, Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage Archives.

Bush 16 Community collaboration is intertwined with the governmental and/or municipal approval of

the communities participating in the Festival, and some of the challenges that the CFCH has

faced have proven too overwhelming to overcome. The Jerusalem program, conceived as a

major program for the 1993 Festival, was indefinitely postponed and has never been staged. The

project was researched in the home country alongside Israeli and Palestinian research team

members, with the goal of presenting cultural traditions which acknowledged the ongoing

conflicts in which the traditions were created and documented commonalities. Fundraising

events for the large program ultimately failed, in part because of political developments in the

region, the economic recession in the United States, and budget cuts to the Smithsonian and the

program did not materialize. Curator Amy Horowitz writes that the Center may have been on

stronger ground had they proposed a smaller program with more funding, discussed alternative

plans at initial meetings and shared more budget information which was rooted in fiscal reality.41

However, perhaps the greatest challenge that curators face lies outside of the logistical

sphere of Festival research and production. Curators must convince visitors that the cultural

exchange that they are part of is valuable and meaningful in a consumer-based society which

places value on monetary goods and transactions. According to curator Mark Puryear,

We have a culturally very highly developed sets of commercial and marketing ability in this culture, but I think that there are things that we present at the festival that operate within but also outside of that, and I think that sometimes the public and even participants have trouble figuring out where the value is of it. It’s not that I put money down for this, or why isn’t this available in mass quantities, or I could get that thing somewhere else for cheaper, for example. When you’re talking about products or things that are handmade or artisan made and people just don’t always understand what it means for one individual

41 Amy Horowitz, “Next Year in Washington: The Jerusalem Program - Postponement and Rebirth,” in Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, edited by Olivia Cadaval, Sojin Kim, and Diana Baird N’Diaye (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, forthcoming), 261.

Bush 17who is sharing tradition to put something together... and it’s not the same as what they see Kmart or Target.42

Festival Production: Spatial Narrative and Festival Performances

The importance of audience participation in Festivals lies in its ability to move beyond

the exhibitionary complex by enabling visitors to create their own meanings and experiences,

and Jones’ principle of audience participation permeates the Festival. As Jones writes,

“participation differentiates performance ethnography from other forms of documentation and

representation… through participation, the audience can contrast their own culturally inscribed

bodies with those from the community being shared.”43 During the Festival, participation

primarily happens through the layout of the Festival and through Festival performances, and

ideally leads to the sharing of knowledge between participants and visitors.

Festival Layout

New museology offers visitors choice and supports the consideration of multiple

viewpoints,44 and the layout of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival aims to map a spatial narrative

which allows for agency on the part of the visitor and the creation of a collaborative experience

between performer and visitor. CFCH Education Specialist Betty J. Belanus and intern Katie

Fernandez write in Curator that the 2013 Festival was mapped with “many pathways and no

42 Puryear, interview.

43 Jones, 10.

44 Marstine, 28.

Bush 18entrance,”45 which the authors compares to a constructivist museum which allows visitors to

choose their own path and make their own meaning and experience. The Festival’s site on the

Mall allows for many points of entry, with the most popular being the Smithsonian exit of the

Metro underground subway system, where the visitor comes up from the darkness of the Metro

station to the bright, hot, sensory environment of the decorated Mall space.46 These multiple

user-generated pathways at the Festival embrace a form of public participation which Adair et. al

describe as a type of “public curation” where museum visitors can create their own meanings.47

The number of pathways open to visitors can become more complex based on each

Festival’s programming. According to Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, the 2002 Festival program The Silk

Road: Connecting Cultures, Creating Trust was mapped on the National Mall through a thematic

organization which conveyed the twin ideas of cultural exchange and the Silk Road itself, but

was difficult to align with the physical space of the Mall.48 As the first Festival dedicated to a

single program and concept, The Silk Road was ambitious and remains unique among Festivals,

with five “sentinels of arrival”49 on the Silk Road represented on the Mall. But by providing

visitors with too many spatial messages, the experience became overwhelming, and some of the

program’s message - the interconnectedness of ideas, goods, and technologies along the routes of

45 Betty J. Belanus and Katie Fernandez, “Making Meaning on the Mall: The Smithsonian Folklife Festival as a Constructivist Museum,” Curator 57, no. 4 (October 2014): 442.

46 Ibid., 441.

47 Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski, Introduction to Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, eds. Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski (Philadelphia: Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 2011), 12.

48 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “World Heritage and Cultural Economics.” In Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006), 174.

49 Smithsonian Institution, “Smithsonian Folklife Festival: The Silk Road: Connecting Cultures, Creating Trust,” http://www.festival.si.edu/2002/the-silk-road/smithsonian (accessed May 2016).

Bush 19the Silk Road50 - may have been diminished. Belanus and Fernandez acknowledge that having

multiple pathways is not always effective in the transmission of curatorially defined meaning.

Experiments meant to route visitors through curatorially designed pathways at the 2013 Festival

were largely ignored as visitors moved independently throughout the Festival to find what most

interested them. According to the authors, “curators can only hope visitors pause to read a

thematic sign, or ‘get’ the intended message by other means, such as attending a session

explicating the theme, or reading about the theme in [Festival-produced] materials.”51This

suggests that traversing the “many pathways” of the Festival without specific guidelines may not

be as effective in creating the Smithsonian’s intended “cultural conversations” as more direct

contact between participants and visitors, unless the curator-visitor relationship is reimagined to

create what Laura Koloski terms a “combined expertise”52; a collaborative approach where

practitioners from different fields (which could include visitors) open themselves up to different

perspectives as well as share their skills.

Typology of Performances

Festival performances can create collaborative experiences through what Alice O’Grady

and Rebekka Kill term an embodied “state of encounter”53 between participants and the

audience. Rather than a single site of encounter which ends with the festival’s conclusion,

performance allows for a continued state of encounter that lives on in the participants and

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid., 442.

52 Laura Koloski, quoted in Adair, et. al, Introduction to Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, 13.

53 Alice O’Grady and Rebekka Kill, “Exploring Festival Performance as a State of Encounter,” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 12, no. 2–3 (April 1, 2013).

Bush 20continues to be transmitted onwards as a form of embodied “festival knowledge.” This festival

knowledge is part of the need for the incorporation of multiple voices and viewpoints (what

Jones terms “multivocality”) within performances. For Jones, “the active process of synthesizing

[multiple voices and viewpoints present in performances] turns the audience into collaborators in

the experience as they sort through the different points of view.”54

The presenter plays a crucial role during Festival performances in relationship with

performance ethnography, as the presenter (who may also be a curator or researcher involved

with Festival programming) must be aware of his or her subjectivity and situate themselves

appropriately within the context of the performance: placing the knowledge and experiences of

the participant at the forefront. Jones writes that “ethnographers do not present the culture but are

but are conscious of how they act as interpreters of the culture,”55 and the CFCH arms presenters

with multiple reference materials prior to the Festival to best understand how their duties can be

accomplished. The aforementioned Presenter’s Guide is explicit that the presenters should act as

intermediaries.

The Festival is designed to foreground community tradition-bearers themselves… Your role as a presenter is to enhance the participants’ presentations at the Festival and facilitate their communication with the Festival audience. You bring an understanding of the cultural traditions of the participants, their social history and their contemporary situation… as a cultural intermediary, you display your knowledge and skill to affirm those of the participants and to help them become available to a general public accurately, respectfully, and with appropriate aesthetic values.

The production phase of the Festival includes six types of performances which incorporate

aspects of performance ethnography to varying degrees: Live Performances, Demonstrations,

Cross Programs, Narrative Sessions, Workshops, and Off-Stage Performances, all of which are

54 Jones, 9.

55 Jones, 9.

Bush 21interpreted by the audience through presenters.56 Impromptu performances between participants

can also occur offstage on the Festival site, and some participants also informally “jam” together

at the participant hotel.57 Live musical and dance performances tend to be visually exciting and

attract the largest crowds, and presenters employ different strategies for framing performances

and encouraging audiences to listen and dance where appropriate. Participating in these

performances, even in limited roles as dancers in an audience, enhances visitors’ understandings

of how culture is reflected through the body and in body knowledge.

Informal demonstrations where participants interact face to face with the public are at the

heart of the Festival, and a festival presenter aids these “non performer” participants in craft,

religious, occupational, and foodways demonstrations by presenting the nature and meaning of

their activity so that it becomes a performance. For demonstrations, engaging multiple senses is

key to creating a shared understanding through embodiment. Some participants may take a hands

on approach, letting visitors touch their crafts or try creating them. During foodways

demonstrations, visitors can see and smell the food being prepared, but Federal regulations

prohibit the audience from tasting it. In an analysis of a foodways demonstration during the 2008

Bhutan program, curator Betty Belanus writes that a level of sensory engagement which moves

beyond the visual to include the mind and body encourages an immersive experience of “being

present,” which is the key to understanding other cultures at the Folklife Festival.58 Price and

Price unsurprisingly disagree with the success of foodways demonstrations, finding the

56 Web links to examples of these types of performances on the Festival’s website can be found in my practicum product.

57 Place, interview; Cadaval and Kim, discussion.

58 Betty Belanus, “Smithsonian Folklife Festival: Many Auspicious Doors,” Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, eds. Olivia Cadaval, Sojin Kim, and Diana Baird N’Diaye (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, forthcoming), 225.

Bush 22demonstration which they observed during the 1992 program poorly executed on the part of the

presenter (who lacked a microphone), and thus part of the “slippage” between the Festival’s

rhetoric and reality.59 Although the authors’ statement rather seems to be an overgeneralization

as it is based on a single presentation, it also underscores the importance of knowledgeable and

properly prepared presenters in the success of a Festival.

Cross programs are performances, demonstrations, workshops, or narrative sessions

organized around specific themes that bring together participants from the different programs at

the Festival. They are rarely listed as specific “cross programs” in the Festival program booklets

available to the public, which suggests that they either occur far more infrequently than other

performances, or more likely, that the definition of “cross program” is somewhat nebulous and

elements of cross programs are incorporated into other categories of Festival performance.

Cross-programs thus reflect the principles of performance ethnography apparent in other types of

performances.

Narrative sessions are 45-minute long moderated conversations with participants that

may take the form of a discussion, interview, storytelling, demonstration, workshop, or a

combination of these. Workshops provide participants with the opportunity to discuss and

demonstrate their traditions in frameworks that may involve generic comparison between ethnic

or regional groups, personal comparison within a cultural group, or more socially based topics.

Although they can be verbally based, narrative sessions and workshops (which can have some

overlap) are the most likely types of Festival performance to embody performance ethnography

by creating cultural conversations centered around a specific theme, idea, or question. The name

“narrative stage” comes out of the narratives, or stories, that ideally come out of the participants

59 Price and Price, 42-43.

Bush 23in a natural manner.60 Moderated by a presenter around a single topic, sessions allow participants

to address pertinent cultural issues and enter into conversations with each other and the audience.

Presenters incorporate Jones’ principle of multivocality - “encouraging audience

members to share their perspective during the performance”61 in both workshops and narrative

sessions through opening up sessions to the audience for discussion and questioning. The Hip-

Hop Workshop session with rap artist Head Roc unfolded as a discussion about the intersections

between activism, political engagement, and change between the presenter and participant, with

each sharing their stories before taking questions and comments from the audience, who drew

upon their personal experiences growing up with hip-hop music.62 Narrative sessions also allow

for deep engagement through extended question and answer sessions with presenters and

visitors; approximately half of each narrative session is dedicated to taking questions from

visitors. During sessions with D.C. based hip hop artist Christylez Bacon during the 2012

program Citified: Arts and Creativity East of the Anacostia River, the presenter made the

program’s themes explicit to the participant and the audience, while interspersed with

performances, and ending with a group singalong to one of Christylez’s songs.

Presenter: I should let you all know that the main themes for the program are identity, community, creativity, and change, and those are really important themes. We want to know how Anacostia expresses their identity through their art. We want to know how they engage with the community around them through engagement and activism; we want to know how people create the new out of the old, what has changed, what hasn’t

60 Place, interview.

61 Jones, 9.

62 Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage Archives, “Hip-Hop Workshop: Head Roc” (FP-2012-CT-036).

Bush 24changed. Could you [Christylez] tell me in your work/music how you engage in those themes?63

Presenter: You gave us a little of your beatboxing, we need to see more. You have your guitar, you have your drums, do you mind giving us a mini performance or a demonstration [of your musical style]?

Presenter: Can you talk about the importance of engaging the youth and the impact of music on youth, powerful messages, and role models?

Although the presenter’s questions were generally targeted towards the program’s theme, at

times the presenter failed to provide basic information on the session’s main topic. For example,

during the Hip-Hop session “African Influences in Go-Go,” the presenter began the session with

a detailed discussion of human beatboxing but failed to discuss the basics of go-go music,

leading to a visitor asking Christylez for clarification: “I’m a little confused about hip hop and go

go. Is one more advanced than the other? Did one grow out of the other, or is it the same?”64

Covering basic topics in the introduction to the narrative session would allow for deeper

audience engagement with the participants.

Off-stage and impromptu performances literally break down barriers between participants

and the audience, perhaps creating the greatest opportunities for embodied connections between

participants and visitors. In fact, the only elements of the Festival which Price and Price argued

came close to the Festival’s goals were performances which broke free of the Festival’s

scheduled framework; where the “staging all but disappeared,” such as when the Saramaka tribe

put on a spontaneous play to honor a chief.65 O’Grady and Kill introduce the term “relational 63 Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage Archives, “Hip-Hop: Christylez

Bacon” (FP-2012-CT-035).

64 Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage Archives, “Hip-Hop Session: Christylez Bacon & Melvin Deal: African Influences in Go-Go” (FP-2012-CT-197).

65 Price and Price, 90, 94.

Bush 25performances” to describe the nature of impromptu performance: “live performance often

encountered in and emanating from unexpected places; in a dancing crowd, on a corner, in the

campsite… Whilst it may occur without prior knowledge, warning or agreement from the

audience, it requires dialogue, interaction or audience intervention to make it work.” The purpose

of relational performance is to catalyze encounters and erode barriers between visitors and

performers. This leads festival goers to become “co-authors of their own festival experience

rather than merely consumers of a pre-packaged product.”66

Relational off-stage performances echo “curatorial conversations” by allowing

participants and visitors to have greater amounts of agency than in traditional concert settings.

Two different types of off-stage performances occur at the Festival: pre-planned performances

which occur outside of a stage environment, and impromptu performances which break out

spontaneously amongst participants. Some staged performances such as sacred ceremonies,

parades, processions, street theater, jugglers, and games are presented in open air spaces or

settings specifically designed for them. These sites can be staged to evoke public spaces where

these traditional performances take place such as parks, plazas, streets, or stores. Visitors are

often drawn to processionals, and in the case of the New Orleans Evening Concert Series in

2006, visitors followed the brass band around the Mall.67

Impromptu performances occasionally break out at the Festival site and create a sense of

collaboration and community amongst the participants and enjoyment for visitors. Informal

performances can pop up in backstage areas which are the Festival’s equivalent of a “green

room” where participants can congregate. The participant hotel is often a site of these informal

66 Ibid., 19. 67 Place, interview.

Bush 26performances and “jam sessions” which develop through participants’ interaction with each other

after the Festival day ends.68 Unfortunately, there is not as much information or documentation

available on impromptu performances at the Festival because of their spontaneous nature.

Conclusions

In conclusion, the research and production processes of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival

generally align with the principles of performance ethnography. Curators embed collaboration

with communities into their research processes, incorporating the voices of the participants as

much as possible and viewing their roles as cultural intermediaries rather than sources of

authoritative knowledge. The strongest parallels with performance ethnography on-site occur

during performances rather than through the built environment. Despite the best efforts of the

CFCH, the built environment is viewed by some scholars as contentious and objectifying. The

Festival’s layout of “many pathways” provides visitors with a multitude of opportunities for

experiencing the Festival and creating their own individualized experiences through public

curation, but may also lead to visitors missing what curators consider the Festival’s main

messages. The scheduled sessions which best embody multiple aspects of performance

ethnography are narrative sessions and workshops, particularly the sessions which incorporate

performances (whether musical, artistic, craft, or otherwise) by participants. These sessions,

designed around a theme, allow for deep engagement between presenter, participant, and visitors

through conversation and sensory experiences, such as singing along to participants’ music.

The implications of using performance ethnography as an analytical framework for the

Festival are twofold. First, examining how multidirectional relationships are embodied adds to

our understanding of new museology through examining how curatorial authority can be shared

68 Place, interview.

Bush 27through performance practices. More in-depth research, including perhaps a case study of the

inner workings of a single Festival program, is needed to develop a more specific analytical

model for performance ethnography in a Festival setting. Second, performance ethnography

suggests potential room for development at the Festival. Impromptu performances hold great

promise for understanding multidirectional connections and communicatory experiences through

relational performance, but they are somewhat understandably not as prevalent or documented in

great detail at the Festival, in part because of their spontaneous nature. Although the Festival is

constrained by obvious logistical factors (such as budget limitations and the need for keeping to

a strict performance schedule), incorporating elements which encourage relational performance

within the Festival’s framework could add to our understanding of the lasting effects of

“curatorial conversations.” Future research on performance ethnography at the Festival could

incorporate voices of the participants in order to gain perspective on the connections that are

made at the Festival, and what participants “take home” with them after the Festival has ended.

Some Festivals, such as Colombia and Appalachia, have been re-staged in the home countries,

and more follow-up research with participants could explore long-term effects of Festival

participation.

Bush 28

Appendix

Interview Questions for Curators

1. I’d like to know more about your roles in staging the Festival. 2. How would you describe the types of performance at the Festival? Could you provide examples? Where do they happen, and what do they look like? What kinds of informal performances occur? How do visitors react? 3. Does each mode of presentation (such as narrative stage, musical performance) have a separate stage or performance area? 4. What sorts of themes do stages and performance areas have? 5. Do you think that some modes of presentation are particularly effective in creating dialogue between cultural practitioners and Festival visitors? 6. I’d like to know more about the experiences that you’ve had interacting and communicating with cultural practitioners during the Festival. 7. What challenges have you faced at the Festival when working with cultural practitioners or visitors? 8. Have you interacted with any practitioners after the Festival ended? What were the interactions like? 9. Do you feel differently about working with the Festival now than when you first started? Does the Festival seem different than in the past? 10. Is there anything that you would like to change about the Festival’s modes of presentation?

Bush 29

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