“What is the ultimate source of value or quality in art? The answer appears to be: not skill,
training, or anything else to do with execution or performance, but on conception alone.” –
Clement Greenberg, American art critic and writer.
When I saw the Medicine Show for the first time on June 7, which was their second show, I was not thinking of Clement Greenberg, or art for that matter. I had agreed to go along with friends, after three levels of persuasion, because I was a little curious. Not to mention that gloriously despicable lack of anything more promising to do on a weekend night. The name reminded me of a particular quack I saw in Calcutta years ago. He was peddling medicines that ‘helped increased
potency’ and such other things, holding forth amidst a constantly swelling crowd, regaling them with stories, most of them slightly risqué. I could not tear myself away until he finished; no, I didn’t buy anything, I was too young. The quack from Calcutta was using the same technique as
medicine sellers in Europe during the Dark Ages when a ban on circus, vaudeville and such activities led them to perform acts in marketplaces while promoting their home-made mystery cures.
Medicine Shows, which were traveling horses and wagon teams, gained popularity in the US during the last two decades of 19th century, after which legislation made their survival gradually, and increasingly, difficult. Their entertainment included “drama, vaudeville, musical comedy, wild west shows, minstrels, magic, burlesque, dog and pony circus, Punch and Judy,
pantomime, movies, menageries, bands, parades and pie-eating contests”, according to James
Harvey Young, as mentioned in his book The Toadstool Millionaires – A Social History of
Patent Medicines In US Before Federal Registration.
The Medicine Show that I watched in Delhi was held at the “The Living Room” (TLR), an alternative café (Modernist furniture, lilies in liquor bottle vases, old gramophone, Christina Ricci on the wall) in the art-house Hauz Khas village that has come to be the latest favourite of the city’s urbane. TLR hosts all that is high culture: free jams, poetry recitations, readings, music performances, and The Medicine Show, of course. The audience (artists, journalists, expatriates, academics, and the fashionably unemployed) have uniformity in their individuality, something about which Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer have written so incisively in their seminal essay, “The Culture Industry”, stressing that individuality is accepted in our
present age only as long as it identifies completely with the general trend.
The Medicine Show is a variety show(songs, dances, theatre, standup comedy) staged first Sunday of every month, brought out by Stiff Kittens, “a group of avant-garde musicians and actors” (Friday Review, The Hindu, July 3). The group includes a theatre group, The
Tadpole Repertory that describes itself on its Facebook page as “committed to producing and
promoting quality theatre in Delhi. Encouraging new and innovative work on stage, and offering writers, performers, and technical designers a space in which their creative energies can combine, collide and bounce off each other to create something new, something fresh and
unexpected” and Emperor Minge, a Delhi band that is “not hung up on genres… few have been able to describe the ‘Minge Sound’ in any particularly lucid terms, least of all the members themselves…piano lines from a 60’s spy thriller, draped across a kaleidoscope of groovy urgent jazz-thrash meets psychedelic disco flower-pop…(Facebook page)”
Stand-up comedy has been one of the most consistent and popular parts of The Medicine Show. The most redeeming stand-up act that I saw was in their 4th show at the Hotel Crowne Plaza, a five-star Hotel, their new venue, and it was by Sanjay Rajouda, who had the audience doubling up with his earthy, humorous, personal anecdotes delivered with a deadpan face. He uses himself as a common character in all his jokes—as a rustic Jat, an alter-ego he has created that works brilliantly, especially when he takes digs at the ‘modern values’. But the puerile nature of jokes – full of references to the female anatomy and shit – by this stand-up comic Abish in the second edition of the show at TLR were simply in bad taste. The point here is not individual stand up comedians and their merits; it is about the present day obsession with laughter, represented by the popularity of television sitcoms and comedy films. In an age, where people have been turned only into consumers and employees, even the entertainment, amusement and distraction (all three are the antithesis of art and it is one of the basic mistakes The Medicine Show commits by trying to it mix it all) are dictated from the higher ups in the industrial culture and it is never far from the tediousness of the work they return to the next morning. Instead of happiness,
they give you laughter.
The show-business has only one ideology and that is maximisation of profit. In a email that Stefan Kaye, one of the founders of Stiff Kittens, wrote to me to protest my earlier review of
their show at TLR on my blog, told me how they were looking for sponsors now, a clear contradiction to their stand when they started out, “The founders are clear that they will retain the spirit of adventure and prevent the show from ever becoming mainstream. Having
never advertised for acts, the founders know all the artists (Friday Review, The Hindu, July
3).” Not surprising since the Culture Industry that basically assents to its ultimate uselessness
according to the capitalist philosophy despite the premium placed ostensibly on its usefulness, has to be in cahoots with larger industries that dominate the means of production and run the capitalist economy. It can survive by fitting in. Resistance is impossible; hence
their claims to be counter-culture are nothing more than a con-act since resistance is the first
equisite of counter-culture. As Albert Camus said in his introduction to his book The Rebel,
the rebel becomes a rebel the days he says No for the first time. The Medicine Show does not say No to mainstream culture in any way.
By promising impossibly exotic elements like “Brechtian Song Spiels” – as stated in one of their
‘menus’ – The Medicine Show does the same thing as bill-boards and television do, which is to
stimulate the appetite without ever fulfilling it.
Parody is one of their highlights too. For the past two Medicine Shows (Sept. 6 and 13), around
midway through evening, a somewhat rotund, bearded barefoot young man wearing mascara, a headscarf, black spandex short pants and a black Tshirt flounced onto the stage. Glaring at anyone who laughed, he explained that, “as you know”, he never memorises his own poetry,
but prefers to “absorb” it from the page. With great flourishes, and accompanied softly by the band, he used verse to describe his angst at the perceived ugliness of one side of his brain over the other. This went on for a painful length of time.
One of the first things that parody presupposes is a prior knowledge of the subject, in order to subvert it by satirising what the original took too seriously about itself. Even if I discount the
observation that the guy from the show at Crowne Plaza had absolutely no idea about Beat Poetry and its rhythmic pattern, it didn’t surprise me that he picked out Beat Poetry, that fierce rebellion against the cannons of established, academic poetry— a literary movement led by
Alan Ginsberg and his fellow poets that formed part of the avant-garde counter-culture movement of the 1960-70s. Avant Garde art has always been an imitation of
imitation, which is to say that if all art is inherently imitative as the Aristotlian concept goes, then Avant Garde imitated the process of art, for which it was termed “art for art’s
sake”. But the act by the abovementioned performer was an imitation of the imitation of their
idea of beat poetry.
The irony about the show is that, despite being very much a part of the mainstream capitalist culture, they make contrary claims, which is inherently wrong. In our age when art has been turned into a commodity (The event organisers charge the audience Rs 300 per show as cover) , any form of moving away from the trend, which the Medicine Show pretends to do, is accepted as a sign of final acceptance of its norms by the culture industry.
In its Facebook messages, it asks its audience to “Reject Pop Culture” by coming to its shows. But Medicine Show is Pop-culture itself. The medicine shows of the yore were an alternative space where artists who had to live on the margins of society “due to their temperaments, habits
or pasts which doomed them to dreary, ill-paid, nomadic lives” (James Harvey Young) performed to a mostly country-side audience which gave the whole thing a folk
quality. The performers at The Medicine Show we are talking about are every inch assimilated into the grain of the society they mistakenly believe to be subverting. It’s a mathematical impossibility from a cultural view-point.
The influence of pastiche can be seen in the music played by Emperor Minge that provides
musical support in between and during the acts. They seem to have plenty of influences, but they claim to be genre defying on their My Space page. It is not my intention to define their genre or to decode their influences. Emperor Minge is competent but they lack a sound that
can be called their own. It keeps on veering from one direction to other and rarely comes together as a whole. They use the syncopated beat a lot, which is also interpreted as the annihilation of human tragedy in our age by the Culture Industry as the beat symbolises a man stumbling but conforming by catching up with the mainstream. Nevertheless, due to
the musical abilities of its members, except the guitarist, they manage to sound good and remain the best part about the whole show.
The element of Burlesque runs through all their performances, for example in the exaggerated song renditions by this performer who sings the operettas dressed in grotesque costumes and make-up. Burlesque comes from Burlar, the Spanish word for “to make fun of”. It has been used by comedians to poke fun at the rigid norms of society and the bourgeoisie decorum. In doing
this, they took certain risks because they were making fun of a class higher than them and more
powerful. But performers at The Medicine Show belong to the same class as their audiences and are poking fun at their own class. Trying to provoke them with risqué vocabulary and creating farcical situations involving the audience is just an exercise in redundancy because they are sustained by the same audience.
Parody, pastiche and burlesque have traditionally been tools of subversion by defying what have
been the norms in art and society. But here the forms have been used for the heck of it, to create an impression, without substantial content or context. Without the support of content, the form appears superficial.
The first play by Tadpole Repertory that I saw was called I Fucking Love You – it was about
young urban couples and contemporary relationships, ostensibly – and it was a series of acts that ran intermittently during The Medicine Show. The second one I saw, at the Crown Plaza, was a stylised representation of balloon fight in which two girls in sports gear fought with balloons in an
exaggerated manner while a man spoke in a fake Eastern- European/Italian/God-knowswhat
accent in a megaphone.
The six parts essential for something to be termed drama according to Aristotle in his incomplete work, The Poetics, are: plot, characters, diction, thought, spectacle, and melody. In the skits
by the Tadpole Repertory, I Fucking Love You, for example, there was a total absence of plot,
to start with and no development of characters. Diction was all over the place and there was no voice modulation. The vacuity of the skit also made it clear that there wasn’t any thought put behind them. Improvisation works till it stems from a genuine source of concern, without which it goes all over the place. There was neither spectacle nor melody. I do not understand why it should be called theatre at all.
As Aristotle says, “as for comedy, it is an imitation of men worse than average, worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the ridiculous, which is a species of the ugly.” However, it doesn’t mean that the way of presentation has to
be also ridiculous, as it was in the balloon fight. The comedies of Oscar Wilde are full of the ridiculous but the presentation is as elegant as elegant can be, something which is sorely missing in the performances of the Tadpole Repertory and Stiff Kittens.
The only performer among all of them in all their plays who moved me with his acting was the interloper in their skit in the 4th show— he played a crude, gate-crashing Delhi party pooper; in front of his masterly act, the amateurishness of the whole group became all too stark.
Their skits are symptomatic of our age in which independent thinking is discouraged and the audience is given signals to react to situations (think sitcoms) since true communication is not only impossible, it is frowned upon. The use of nonsense in their skits, generally a ploy used by comedians to defy meaning, has been appropriated in the service of the culture industry of which the Medicine Show is a part. It fits in with their lack of desire to truly communicate with the audience.
Their star singer Piyush Vadhera affects a Raj-Kapoorish air, with his hat and rolled up trousers and a fake-earnest expression, trying to appear as someone on the margins of the society. The façade cuts little ice with the discerning. Piyush is as far from a marginalised troubadour
singing of the working class as earth is from Saturn. The first test of a musician is his ability to play and of a singer, to sing. Piyush fares a little better at the former than the latter, and his Hindi songs are much better than his pretentious English songs with irredeemable lyrics and
compositional skills.
As far as the venue is concerned, if the original medicine shows were performed in “opera houses, halls, storerooms, ball-parks, show-boats, and tents, large and small, as well as doorways, street corners and fairs”, (James Harvey Young), the organisers of this Medicine Show have moved to a five-star from a stand-alone pub, which had at least some pretension to non-commercial art and independence.
To come back to Clement Greenberg, even if we are willing to ignore the level of skills and training of the performers at The Medicine Show, and talk nothing of the execution and performance, we still have to talk of their conception of art. As Greenberg himself states elsewhere, the mix of Avant-Garde and Kitsch, something which The Medicine Show has been attempting, can only lead to further depravation of culture and art.
In plain and simple terms, it is reactionary, and accordingly, status-quoist, without any progressive qualities to redeem itself. Such an “artistic” endeavour doesn’t contribute to the over-all health of art and by masquerading as counter-culture, it is trying to confuse the audience. It’s high time this bluff was called off.
