Music Research Seminar Thursday 30th January, 5.15pm Lecture room A, Alison House – Refreshments provided In this week’s seminar Dr Freya Jarman, Senior Lecturer, University of Liverpool, will discuss:- You took the words right out of my mouth: the camp powers of lip-syncing Lip-syncing in various forms has been an important element of cinema for probably as long as sound and vision have been integrated in the medium; for instance, in musical films in particular, singers have provided voices for non-singing actors who lip-sync to construct an illusion of their vocal ability. Outside of the cinema, more than one musical scandal has emerged when a performing artist or group is revealed to have been lip-syncing to voices other than their own. There is a particular kind of cinematic scene in which lip-syncing is not an illusory act to deceive an audience, but an openly deployed device with particular purposes and effects/affects. Such scenes (and similar occasions in television, YouTube videos, and stage performances) very often have resultsthat are queer (La mala educación/Priscilla Queen Of The Desert), orcomedic (Bridget Jones’s Diary/Love Actually), or—with striking frequency—some combination of the two (Austin Powers in Goldmember). Other lip-syncs, meanwhile, open up affects rather different from the comedic, such as abjection (Mulholland Drive), or the bizarre (The SingingDetective). In many such scenes, the act of lip-syncing is a self-consciously camp device, something that links it strongly with drag performance (as exemplified by the lip-sync battles on Ru Pauls Drag Act); in others, camp requires scratching out from beneath the surface, but it is present nonetheless. This paper explores what it is about lip-syncing--what, indeed, it is about the explicit disruption of voice from body--that makes it such a powerfully camp device. This in turn opens up the question of how camp--so commonly taken to be a frivolity of performance--can access such a variety of affective agendas, and what such instances might reveal about the politics of camp.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 10:26:07 +0000
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