Performing the humanities at the Ethiopian Millennium
The performing arts, sometimes regarded as separate from the humanities, in fact bring the humanities to life.1 Through performance, the written word travels from the mind’s eye to the lips and to the ear; painting and sculpture suddenly spring into motion; and music takes wing from the imagination or from a score to fill all available sonic space. A moment of performance, at its best, gathers together various domains of human expression, a sensory experience able at once to narrate history, enact social relationships, symbolize systems of belief, and generate feelings of fear, comfort, or joy. While the humanities are generally conceived as the disciplines spanning fields of knowledge such as literature or philosophy, they simultaneously provide the basis for much of human behavior and patterns of interaction expressed through the arts. Music and its performance, in particular, convey these multiple domains of knowledge as well as provide “audible entanglements,” shaping both individual imaginations and broader communities.2
Performance tells us less about procedures than it does about processes. Ideally, performance incorporates spectators and performers alike, reaching out from the present to extend both into the past and the future, reaffirming existing collectivities and creating new ones. Take, for instance, the September 8, 2007, performance in Washington, D.C., to mark the advent of the Ethiopian Millennium.1 More than five thousand D.C.-area Ethiopian immigrants2 turned out for the concert, which provided a bracketed moment for members of the Ethiopian diaspora community in D.C. to reaffirm their identities as Ethiopians, in solidarity with (but also in opposition to) others dispersed around the world. That Ethiopians in the homeland marked the passage of the millennium with a celebratory concert, too, provides fascinating data for comparative studies, discussed briefly in my conclusion. . . .