< Back to previous page

Project

Staging the Musical Self(ie). An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Subversive Potential of Musical Persona Performance in Times of Social Media.

This research project explores how music artists disclose a public identity incorporating elements of their quotidian precarious identity in an age of social media. It departs from music and theatre artists Ivo Dimchev and Matthias Ringgenberg (PRICE) who multiply their performed presence into a hybrid musical persona using the reconfigured context of social media. This amalgamated musical self(ie) provides an interesting critical potential for staging precarious identities related to queerness, socio-economic status and new technologies. In contrast to how these theatrical stagings reflect the reconfigured context of social media for the music artist, the concept of musical persona attaches to several disciplines yet has never been re-negotiated in relation to the potential of social media as a performance platform. Rather than revisiting the notion of musical persona, this study has the ambition to aggregate the existing performance parameters that contribute to the constitution of a contemporary persona paradigm by drawing on a careful selection of music artists who have equally negotiated dimensions of precarious identities through a musical persona. This comprehensive interdisciplinary conceptualization of the musical persona will enable an in-depth reading of the subversive potential of social media-infused forms of self-presentation, both in the context of popular music and of contemporary performance.

Date:1 Nov 2020 →  Today
Keywords:Subversive Potential of Musical Persona, Musical Persona on Social Media, Performance and Performativity of Contemporary Music Artist
Disciplines:Performance, Music performance, Dramaturgy, Theatre and performance not elsewhere classified, Philosophy of culture