Dakota and the Screaming Letters

Young-Hae Chang’s “Dakota” interested me precisely because it was different from most of the other listenings we heard because it wasn’t just an audio, but a visual as well. Without visuals, the piece would lose much of its meaning, but the same goes for sound: they each complement each other. Mackey, in “Cante Moro”, reminded me of “Dakota” when he wrote in reference to a piece of music that “the two lines of articulation are wrestling with one another, that they are somehow one another’s contagion or contamination” (10) in that the music/noise and the words seem to compete with each other for the attention, since they are both visually or audibly loud, the former because of the black all capitalized (denotes yelling) letters and the latter because of loud drums and symbols. Then again, they could also be seen as complementary like a dancer to music.

This leads me to my first question: Is Young-Hae Chang’s “Dakota” a performance or a text? To answer my own very thought-provoking question (think now, before you read the spoiler answer below), the piece is a text because it is in a fixed state (although not as fixed as an edition of a book) and because there is not a live audience to give immediate feedback. It is an odd text, though, since the readers of it cannot pause it or slow it down like they can with a book. The audience does not have as much power over the text, except to start or end it, as they would with a traditional text. In addition, the performed word seems to be just people reading their poetry. In order for this piece to be a performance, Young-Hae Chang (or anyone else) could perform the music/noise within the current “Dakota” and show the words on a screen behind him. It seems that the reason why the piece cannot be a performance is because, again, there is not a live audience, even though there’s not a live audience for films, either. It’s almost the difference between a live play and a pre-recorded film in the movie theatre.

Now that I’ve managed to complicate my own answer, I will leave you with my second question: How does performance poetry, as opposed to the written form, inhibit an audience’s interpretation or does the performance aspect merely add to the piece’s ability to speak (haha) to an audience?