Abstracts
Abstract
For Cirque du Soleil’s touring arena show Corteo, music is a central feature of every performance. In this article, I focus on Corteo’s touring sound technicians, who play an essential role in the show’s musical presentation. I discuss a methodological approach to my ethnographic research, which provides new insights into large-scale intermedia performance environments like Corteo. I theorize a masculine-gendered, stoic mode of emotional labour that is enacted through voice-to-voice remote communication during performance. Through participant observation, public intercept interviews, and what I call “working interviews”—interviews with the sound technicians that take place during performances or other operational activities—I engage directly with the technical and emotional labour practices of musical production.
Keywords:
- Cirque du Soleil,
- emotional labour,
- sound technician,
- ethnomusicology,
- working interview
Résumé
Pour le spectacle itinérant du Cirque du Soleil, Corteo, la musique est au coeur de chaque représentation. Dans cet article, je me concentre sur les techniciens du son de tournée de Corteo, qui jouent un rôle essentiel dans la présentation musicale du spectacle. Je discute d’une approche méthodologique de ma recherche ethnographique, qui fournit de nouvelles perspectives sur les environnements de performance intermédia à grande échelle comme Corteo. Je théorise un mode masculin et stoïque de travail émotionnel qui est mis en oeuvre par une communication à distance voix à voix pendant la représentation. Grâce à l’observation participante, aux entretiens publics interceptés et à ce que j’appelle des « entretiens de travail » —des entretiens avec les techniciens du son qui ont lieu pendant les performances ou d’autres activités opérationnelles—je m’engage directement dans les pratiques de travail techniques et émotionnelles de la production musicale.
Mots-clés :
- Cirque du Soleil,
- charge mentale,
- technicien de son,
- ethnomusicologie,
- entrevue de travail
Download the article in PDF to read it.
Download
Appendices
Biographical note
Jacob Danson Faraday is a performer, sound designer, and touring sound technician. As a scholar, he examines the creative influence of live sound technicians and the working communities of large-scale touring productions. He is a recent graduate of the ethnomusicology PhD program at Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Bibliography
- Ahmed, Sara. 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- Barz, Gregory F., and Timothy J. Cooley, eds. 2008. Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Bates, Eliot. 2016. Digital Tradition: Arrangement and Labor in Istanbul’s Recording Studio Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. New York: Chandler.
- Batson, Charles R. 2012. “‘Bêtes de Scène’: Robert Lepage’s Totem, Circus, and the Freakish Human Animal.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 16 (5): 615–23.
- Berger, Harris M. 1999. Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
- Brooks, Daphne A. 2021. Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674258808.
- Brooks, Grace, Amandine Pras, Athena Elafros, and Monica Lockett. 2021. “Do We Really Want to Keep the Gate Threshold That High?” Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 69 (4): 238–60. https://doi.org/10.17743/jaes.2020.0074.
- Dahlie, Christopher. 2018. “In Concert with…: Concert Audio Engineers and Arena Sound Systems, 1965–2018.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina.
- Daughtry, J. Martin. 2015. Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Diamond, Beverley. 2021. On Record: Audio Recording, Mediation, and Citizenship in Newfoundland and Labrador. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
- Doane, Mary Ann. 1980. “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space.” Yale French Studies 60:33–50.
- Duffy, Brooke Erin. 2016. “The Romance of Work: Gender and Aspirational Labour in the Digital Culture Industries.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 19 (4): 441–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877915572186.
- Feld, Steven. 2015. “Acoustemology.” In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, 13–21. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Feld, Steven, and Carroll Williams. 1975. “Toward a Researchable Film Language.” Studies in Visual Communication 2 (1): 25–32.
- Flint, Courtney, Zack Oldroyd, Elizabeth Wynn, Alexander Brown, Charles Mascher, Phillip Valle, Quinton Cannon, and Bethany Unger. 2016. “Public Intercept Interviews and Surveys for Gathering Place-Based Perceptions: Observations from Community Water Research in Utah.” Journal of Rural Social Sciences 31 (3): 105–25.
- Fox, Aaron. 2004. Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
- Grubbs, David. 2020. The Voice in the Headphones. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Guilbault, Jocelyne, and Roy Cape. 2011. Roy Cape: A Life on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2003. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Horning, Susan Schmidt. 2004. “Engineering the Performance: Recording Engineers, Tacit Knowledge and the Art of Controlling Sound.” Social Studies of Science 34 (5): 703–31.
- Hunt, Nick, and Susan Melrose. 2005. “Techne, Technology, Technician: The Creative Practices of the Mastercraftsperson.” Performance Research 10 (4): 70–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2005.10871452.
- Jackson, Bruce. 1987. Fieldwork. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
- Jensen-Moulton, Stephanie. 2016. “Musical and Bodily Difference in Cirque du Soleil.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, edited by Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil William Lerner, and Joseph Nathan Straus, 210–25. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Johnson, Mark. 2017. “Gendering Pastoral Power: Masculinity, Affective Labour and Competitive Bonds of Solidarity among Filipino Migrant Men in Saudi Arabia.” Gender, Place and Culture 24 (6): 823–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2015.1090411.
- Kielich, Gabrielle. 2021. “Road Crews and the Everyday Life of Live Music.” PhD diss., Montreal: McGill University.
- Kotiswaran, Prabha. 2011. Dangerous Sex: Invisible Labor, Sex Work and the Law in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
- Krantz, Gene. 2001. Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond. New York: Simon & Schuster.
- Kuhn, Timothy. 2006. “A ‘Demented Work Ethic’ and a ‘Lifestyle Firm’: Discourse, Identity, and Workplace Time Commitments.” Organization Studies 27 (9): 1339–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840606067249.
- Leslie, Deborah, and Norma M. Rantisi. 2019. “Deskilling in Cultural Industries: Corporatization, Standardization and the Erosion of Creativity at the Cirque du Soleil.” Geoforum 99:257–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.09.011.
- Mahy, Isabelle. 2005. “Innovation, artistes et managers: Ethnographie du Cirque du Soleil.” PhD diss., Université de Montréal.
- Marshall, Owen. 2020. “Shibboleths in the Studio: Informal Demarcation Practices among Audio Engineers.” Social Studies of Science 50 (6): 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312720922314.
- Martin, Michèle. (1991) 2012. “Gender and Early Telephone Culture.” In The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne, 336–50. London: Routledge.
- Mastracci, Sharon H., and Ian Adams. 2019. “Emotional Labor in Emergency Dispatch: Gauging Effects of Training Protocols.” Annals of Emergency Dispatch and Response 7 (3): 5–10.
- McRobbie, Angela. 2011. “Reflections on Feminism, Immaterial Labour and the Post-Fordist Regime.” New Formations 70:60–76. https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF.70.04.2010.
- Meintjes, Louise. 2003. Sound of Africa!: Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Momsen, Janet Henshall, ed. 1999. Gender, Migration, and Domestic Service. London: Routledge.
- Montpetit, Jonathan. 2020. “Quebec’s Cirque du Soleil Files for Bankruptcy Protection.” CBC News, 29 June. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/cirque-du-soleil-bankruptcy-1.5631354.
- Paul, Lynda Allison Helen. 2012. “Sonic Vegas: Live Virtuality and the Cirque du Soleil.” PhD diss., Yale University.
- Peterson-Withorn, Chase. 2015. “Billionaire Guy Laliberte Cashes Out as Investors Acquire Majority Stake in Cirque du Soleil.” Forbes, 20 April. https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2015/04/20/billionaire-guy-laliberte-cashes-out-as-investors-acquire-majority-stake-in-cirque-du-soleil/.
- Pink, Sarah, Shanti Sumartojo, Deborah Lupton, and Christine Heyes LaBond. 2017. “Empathetic Technologies: Digital Materiality and Video Ethnography.” Visual Studies 32 (4): 371–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2017.1396192.
- Porcello, Thomas. 2004. “Speaking of Sound: Language and the Professionalization of Sound-Recording Engineers.” Social Studies of Science 34 (5): 733–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312704047328.
- Price-Glynn, Kim. 2010. Strip Club: Gender, Power, and Sex Work. New York: New York University Press.
- Qashu, Leila. 2019. “Singing as Justice: Ateetee, an Arsi Oromo Women’s Sung Dispute Resolution Ritual in Ethiopia.” Ethnomusicology 63 (2): 247–78. https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.63.2.0247.
- Rantisi, Norma M., and Deborah Leslie. 2014. “Circus in Action: Exploring the Role of a Translation Zone in the Cirque du Soleil’s Creative Practices.” Economic Geography 91 (2): 147–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecge.12082.
- Reeder, Nicholas Clark. 2014. “The Co-Evolution of Improvised Rock and Live Sound: The Grateful Dead, Phish, and Jambands.” PhD diss., Brown University.
- Sandstrom, Boden. 2000. “Women Mix Engineers and the Power of Sound.” In Music and Gender, edited by Pirkko Moisala and Beverley Diamond, 289–307. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
- Scales, Christopher A. 2012. Recording Culture: Powwow Music and the Aboriginal Recording Industry on the Northern Plains. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky. 1995. “Gosh, Boy George, You Must Be Awfully Secure in Your Masculinity!” In Constructing Masculinity, edited by Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson, 11–20. New York: Routledge.
- Sennheiser. 2019. Sennheiser PRO TALK | Christian Peterson: Part 1 of 3. YouTube. https://youtu.be/45oTKIQ6V3M.
- Skeggs, Beverley. 2004. Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge.
- Slaten, Whitney. 2018. “Doing Sound: An Ethnography of Fidelity, Temporality and Labor among Live Sound Engineers.” PhD diss., Columbia University.
- Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Vagnerova, Lucie. 2017. “‘Nimble Fingers’ in Electronic Music: Rethinking Sound through Neo-Colonial Labour.” Organised Sound 22 (2): 250–58. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771817000152.
- Watson, Allan, and Jenna Ward. 2013. “Creating the Right ‘Vibe’: Emotional Labour and Musical Performance in the Recording Studio.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 45 (12): 2904–18. https://doi.org/10.1068/a45619.
- Williams, Alan. 2012. “‘I’m Not Hearing What You’re Hearing’: The Conflict and Connection of Headphone Mixes and Multiple Audioscapes.” In The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field, edited by Simon Frith and Simon Zagorski-Thomas, 113–27. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
- Young, Miriama. 2006. “Latent Body—Plastic, Malleable, Inscribed: The Human Voice, the Body and the Sound of Its Transformation through Technology.” Contemporary Music Review 25 (1/2): 81–92.
- Zemp, Hugo. 1988. “Filming Music and Looking at Music Films.” Ethnomusicology 32 (3): 393–427. https://doi.org/10.2307/851939.
- Ztélé. 2013. Jobs de Bras. Season 6, episode 26. “Machinistes de plateau pour le Cirque du Soleil.” Aired 20 February. Montreal: Ztélé.