When my eyes wafted past the TV screen, they jerked back. They spotted something different, singular, rare. Art. The hand of the Master. Innovation, creation, concept, a stroke of genius. Performance. It was Drag as Pavlova.
Here was the local, the Caribbean, Moko Jumbie, crossing stilts with European dance, ballet. Here was Moko innovating into something larger than itself: white, satire, the macabre, looming littleness atop large long frock. Here was Mas moving beyond the string and beads. Here was an artist’s evocative, grand master stroke on the bland canvass of the fete. Here was Pavlova, art, performing: our excruciating version of ballet.
The German, Hans Robert Jauss, is one of the most relevant philosophers of our time. In his theory of the aesthetics of reception, that is, of how readers, audience “receive” art and cultural artefacts, he develops the concept of “the horizon of expectations.” Artistic works located in their social and historical situation grow to fulfil their audience’s horizon of expectations. For some time this horizon does not change since the works all fall within their normative expectations.
But then comes along a work that shocks and challenges belief structures. When this happens a new horizon is created. We are always standing within the old horizon searching for the new norms, the new normal, the new horizon. It is the search for new horizons that keep us interested in art, the stage, the novel, the poem, the Mas. It is this new dividend of the fresh, the original, the innovative, the ploy of difference which draws us in, keeps the forms alive.
Pavlova takes the old horizon gone normal, the Moko Jumbie on stilts, and makes it rare, strange, defamiliarises it. The term defamiliarization was coined by Viktor Shklovsky in 1917. It refers to the art of taking something normal, ordinary, everyday, familiar and making it strange or exciting in order to enhance reception, perception.
Minshall’s Pavlova did not deserve third, it did not deserve last, it did not deserve first. It did not deserve place at all. It is beyond place and the old horizon. It is a mark, a sign, in time and History.
Wayne Kublalsingh