Dancing off the page
You don’t have to watch author performing naked to enjoy her novel The Gift. But it helps
“I am all for inappropriate intimacy,” says Barbara Browning, author, professor, dancer and ukulele-ist. Indeed, before her interview with the Star about her largely autobiographical new novel The Gift, Browning emailed me her ukulele cover of Frank Ocean’s “Sweet Life” after cybersleuthing a tweet I’d posted in praise of the R&B singer.
Such gestures play a pivotal role in her recent novel, which was lauded both by Publisher’s Weekly and the Lena Dunham-curated Lenny Letter. Through sharing ukulele covers with both friends and strangers online, including responding to spam from a weight-loss clinic with a cover of the Frank Sinatra standard “I Wish You Love,” she follows an SEO trail of bread crumbs to the humble home page of a German musician named Sami.
She asks for his permission to choreograph a dance to one of his ukulele pieces and they start swapping messages, then music, then voice messages. Barbara ultimately records several dances for him, in some instances nude.
As with her previous novels The Correspondence Artist and I’m Trying to Reach You, Browning breathes another dimension into these performances by posting video and audio clips of them online. “It’s not enough that I am making you read this 250-page novel, I want you to look at my naked body too,” she jokes.
“But the intention is to go as deep as I can into asking myself why I am writing about these things and why they matter. The self-reflectivity is part of that process.”
Because of this link between text and the performing arts, Browning calls her novels “experiments in performative writing.” It’s a category with a history in academic circles, though curiously few have adapted it to the social media age.
“‘Performative writing’ is a way of inserting a researcher’s own experiences into the work,” says Loretta Jean, a performing arts PhD candidate at the University of Toronto who writes about her own work as a burlesque dancer in the troupe Nerd Girl Burlesque. “Generally, within academia, there is this idea of the impartial researcher who has this objective view of the world. But there is value in your own experiences and sharing that within the context of your research.”
Those who do find Browning’s Soundcloud or her fictional alter-ego Barbara Anderson’s Vimeo page, which is protected by a password found in the book’s front matter, will find the novel’s atmosphere gains new emotional depth.
Browning has posted hundreds of ukulele covers online, including those namedropped in the novel such as Talking Head’s “This Must Be the Place,” Rihanna’s “Birthday Cake” and Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.” Peter Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way” is the first song Barbara Anderson sends to Sami in the novel, and the experience of listening to her spare, guileless rendition makes real what it would be like to receive a love song from a stranger.
Sami discloses early in their relationship that he is a self-described “common freak”: not only does he have a titanium prosthetic leg and take morphine to manage his chronic pain, but he is also autistic.
Barbara choreographed dances to select voice messages that he sent her, including one that he stammered through anxiously. “Some of these messages are filled with breaths and umm and hmm and sighs and so on,” she says.
“A lot of the choreography accentuates and pays attention to the musicality of what is going on between those words. In a way it was parsing out some of the most important elements of spoken language, which was not in the literal text of what he is speaking.
“You don’t need to look at those dances. To be a sensitive reader is to read between the lines. But the dance makes some of that visible.”
Browning is a lonely pioneer in this space. Among the other authors who are folding performance into their text are Montreal-based Nisha Coleman, who built a website through the Banff Centre’s Digital Narratives program for her memoir, Busker, that includes Google Street Views of the Parisian streets where she played her violin and recordings of these performances.
London-based, French-Norwegian artist Caroline Bergvall posts “audiotexts” on her Soundcloud page, including dramatic readings of her poetry that rely on controlled breathing, white noise, repetition and silence to accentuate the mood created by the language.
Her current work is Ragadawn, a live “sonic artwork” designed to be performed outdoors at dawn that features a soprano vocalist supporting Bergvall’s performed poetry. Bergvall intends to follow these performances with a written text.
Despite publishing 14 books, she finds people stumble when she calls herself a writer. “By saying that I am a writer, it sets up a lot of questions,” she says. “What kind of writer? Do you publish books only? These questions fall away if I call myself an artist and a writer.”
These experiments aren’t exactly rewriting the book on how we read — the week that The Gift was published, Browning’s nine dance videos had between three and 12 views each. But for Browning, the dances are not only cornerstones of her novel but key to her writing process.
“I partly do it not just for the reader but also for myself as a way of collaborating with myself,” she says. “It’s something that helps to invigorate my writing or provoke it. It’s not necessarily for the reader’s sake.”