Djoeke Arianne Spiekhout Studentnummer: 5930030 Taal- en Cultuurstudies Bachelor Eindwerkstuk Media en Cultuur ME3V15026 Studiejaar 2019-20, blok 2 Dr. Chiel Kattenbelt 22 Januari 2020 6208 woorden Abstract Beyoncé Knowles-Carter is a common subject in academics because of her unprecedented ability to control the narrative around her. A year after performing at Coachella, she had all music journalism centered on her again by releasing a concert-documentary, named Homecoming. This ​ ​ film not only shows her live performance but also reveals an inside-look at the production-process behind it. As a film directed by Beyoncé herself and released by her management, it deserves a critical look concerning its message construction and agenda. There are already extensive works written about her with regards to postcolonial, gender and marketing studies. Hence this case study will be used to study Beyoncé from a new media and performance study perspective. Therefore, this research sets out to explore the use of dramaturgical strategies in Homecoming to historicize Beyoncé's star identity. It explores how Beyoncé's star identity is ​ built on the visual world she creates and therefore argues that her star identity becomes a spectacle, a term coined by Debord. The spectacle of Homecoming employs internal focalizers ​ ​ ​ and a performative voice to position the spectator to view Beyoncé in a larger, historical perspective. The use of vintage, analogue media aesthetics in a digital film creates an intimate viewing experience that suggests that the event happened in the past, simulating age value to emphasize the documentary's supposedly historical value. These dramaturgical strategies create a historical and social context in which the spectacle of Beyoncé plays out the specific role of ​ ​ inspiring young black people and celebrate their shared heritage. 2 Table of Contents 1 Introduction 4 2 Theoretical Framework & Method 7 3 Analysis 10 3.1 Spectacle 10 3.2 Address 13 3.3 Remediation 20 4. Final remarks 25 4..1 Conclusion 25 4.2 Discussion 27 5. Bibliography 28 Academic References 28 Non-Academic References 30 6. Appendix 32 Verklaring Intellectueel Eigendom 32 3 1 Introduction Few artists know how to control the public narrative like Beyoncé does. In 2018, she headlined Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, one of the biggest, most well-known music festivals worldwide. Even though her performance was barely two hours long, it has been a big topic in media for more than a year after it took place. As women are often the minority on festival line-ups, Beyoncé's presence on the festival poster was already a very welcome one.1 However, she would not be the 'first lady of music' if she settled for solely countering a statistic. She was already making history as the first black woman to headline Coachella and made sure everyone, even the predominantly white audience at the festival, knew it. Inspired by the culture of historically black colleges and universities (often referred to as HBCU's), she transformed her festival performance into a battle of the bands to celebrate her black heritage and black culture overall. Ever since the release of her visual album Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016), Beyoncé is ​ ​ ​ ​ known to build upon her black heritage in her art, which has been thoroughly studied by academics.2 Most studies with relation to gender and postcolonialism focus on the symbolism that refer to Beyoncé's blackness. For example, Hobson analyzed from an art historical perspective how Beyoncé relates herself to black and southern history in her music video Formation through the use of film sets, costumes and compositions.3 The visual references to ​ HBCU culture in her Coachella performance appear to continue that tradition in her art. However, instead of studying the performance from a gender- or postcolonial perspective as most studies about Beyoncé tend to do, it is also interesting from a new media- perspective that 1 Mitchum, Rob, and Diego Garcia-Olano. “Tracking the Gender Balance of This Year’s Music Festival Lineups.” Pitchfork, May 1, 2018. https://pitchfork.com/features/festival-report/tracking-the-gender-balance-of-this-years-music-festival-lineups/. ​ 2 For examples of works, see Adrienne M. Trier-Bieniek, The Beyonce Effect : Essays on Sexuality, Race and ​ Feminism (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2016), ​ http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1281855&site=ehost-live; ​ Janell Hobson, "Remnants of Venus: Evolutions of The Bootylicious Body," in Venus in the Dark : Blackness and ​ Beauty in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2018): 141-78, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315299396; ​ ​ ​ ​ Dayna Chatman, “Pregnancy, Then It’s ‘Back To Business,’” Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 6 (November 2, 2015): ​ ​ 926–41, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2015.1036901. ​ ​ ​ 3 Hobson, "Remnants of Venus," pp. 141-78. 4 focuses on her performativity and use of technology that create her star identity. During the 2019 edition of Coachella, a year after Beyoncé headlined, she released the concert-documentary Homecoming (Knowles-Carter 2019) on Netflix, sharing the story leading up to the performance ​ as narrated by Beyoncé and her team and the final product of the live show. As a result, all media attention returned to her performance while in the meantime, a new edition of the festival was already taking place. Even though many authors like Nichols and Saunders have dedicated studies to the documentary format,4 the music documentary stays behind in academic discourse. As a hybrid form of concert-film, documentary and autobiography, Homecoming is an ​ ​ exceptional case study to understand the creation of celebrity identity through the use of a music documentary. It is remarkable that this documentary appears to reaffirm what her concert reviews had already been saying a year prior: that the performance will be an important part of our cultural memory.5 Netflix describes the documentary as an "intimate, in-depth look at Beyoncé's celebrated 2018 Coachella performance [that] reveals the emotional road from creative concept to cultural movement."6 As Lieb's study showed, Beyoncé tends to act in a way that she thinks her fans and contemporaries will perceive her, playing into the consumer's expectations. Lieb therefore calls Beyoncé a master of impression management as she continuously regulates how her image is perceived.7 Thus, she argues that Beyoncé's public identity is created by producers as well as consumers.8 This explains why Homecoming would play into an already existing ​ ​ public narrative of the Coachella performance as a historical moment in music, but does not explain how it does it. That is why this study wants to explore how Homecoming reinforces that ​ 4 David Saunders, Documentary (Florence, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2010), ​ ​ http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uunl/detail.action?docID=515405; ​ Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 3rd ed. (Bloomington, IN, United States: Indiana University Press, ​ ​ 2017), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uunl/detail.action?docID=4813367. ​ ​ ​ 5 Craig Jenkins, “Beyonce’s Coachella Performance Was An Instant Classic,” Vulture, April 17, 2019, ​ ​ https://www.vulture.com/2018/04/beyonces-coachella-performance-was-an-instant-classic.html; “Beyoncé schrijft ​ geschiedenis met optreden Coachella,” NOS, April 15, 2018, https://nos.nl/l/2227412. ​ ​ ​ 6 Homecoming: A Film By Beyoncé | Official Trailer | Netflix, accessed January 13, 2020, ​ ​ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB8qvx0HOlI. ​ 7 Kristin J. Lieb, Gender, Branding, and the Modern Music Industry : The Social Construction of Female Popular ​ Music Stars (Routledge, 2018): 7, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315160580. ​ ​ ​ ​ 8 Lieb, Gender, Branding, Music Industry, p. 16. ​ ​ 5 sensation of watching history being made and positions a contemporary artist like Beyoncé as a historic figure. Therefore my research question will be: How does Homecoming use dramaturgical ​ strategies to historicize Beyoncé's identity? This question follows the Brechtian term of historicizing, as defined by Pavis, Carlson & Shantz (1998). They define it as the act of showing the sociohistorical circumstances underlying the actions in the play (or documentary in this case). It is not as much about the individuals and their actions, but rather about the social and political context in which those actions take place. This will reveal two historicities: the context of the object being viewed and the one the spectator lives in while watching.9 Historicizing thus stands for the positioning of the object seen within a certain historical light. The following three sub-questions will guide the analysis to answer the research question: What is the role of the act of documentation in the construction of Beyoncé's identity? How do the types of address contribute to the historization of this identity? What is the role of remediation in the historization of Beyoncé? I expect to find that the mediatization of a live performance changes the meaning of the original live performance. Creating a documentary of a live performance will prioritize the appearance over the essence of the performance itself.I anticipate that the voice-overs of Beyoncé and other historical figures, in combination with the footage, create a relationship that invites the spectator to regard Beyoncé as a historical person, even though she is still part of the present. Lastly, I hypothesize that the choice of analogue aesthetics contribute to the sense of watching