Conceptual blending and becoming as tools for interpreting choral multidisciplinary performances: lessons from Meredith Monk's Book of days

Abstract

The cognitive integration networks of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner offer a framework for understanding multimedia performance. Drawing on these conceptual blending networks, specifically the mirror, single-scope, and double-scope networks, this paper illustrates a continuum of multidisciplinary performance. While the phrase mixed media refers to performances where media retain their independent characteristics (mirror network), multimedia references media relationships that develop a new emergent content (double-scope network). While Fauconnier and Turner approach the creation of this emergent content from a cognitive perspective, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari offer an experiential model of becoming that relates to the content of the emergent structure. Content deemed non-representational through this becoming process is considered multisensory and requires the interpretation of an audience; it is an extension of the multidisciplinary performance continuum. Representational content restricts the need for interpretation because the media of a performance make their intentions obvious. To illustrate focal nodes along this multidisciplinary performance continuum, Fauconnier and Turner’s conceptual blending model and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming are applied to excerpts of Meredith Monk’s film Book of Days.