Tessa Vannieuwenhuyze: The Archontically Performed Persona across Popular Music & Contemporary Performing
Arts
Eine
Kooperation der Abteilung Kulturwissenschaften (Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien) und des aka - Arbeitskreis Kulturanalyse
What is at stake when David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust is understood as a character rather than a persona, despite its
frequent citation as a paradigmatic example of persona in popular music? And how does persona equally come into play when
American pop star Lana Del Rey pushes back against having a persona, stating it is “not a David Bowie thing”?
In our current context of rapidly evolving online cultures, persona appears to be everywhere. “The
persona is the message”, art writer Dean Kissick boldly declared in 2021 in a two-part column titled Persona for
Spike Art Magazine. It is woven into the fabric of our mediated realities, shaping how we engage with the world and with one
another. Increasingly used in public discourse to describe the condition of perpetually staging oneself in the public eye,
the term nonetheless remains tightly connected to its origins in the theatrical mask and artistic practice more broadly.
This lecture sets out to present a renegotiation of the concept of persona in music, loosening it from its conventional
grounding in role-playing and rethinking it along two intertwined axes: as curated rather than created, and as archontically
performed. This approach reassembles an understanding of persona that goes beyond a singular, essential expression of identity,
and instead develops it as a particularly apt lens through which to gain insight into the intensifying interstice of hybrid
practices that traverse the stages of contemporary performing arts and pop music.
Tessa Vannieuwenhuyze
is a performance studies scholar affiliated with the research groups Cultural Studies KU Leuven and S:PAM (Studies in Performing
Arts and Media) at Ghent University, where she also teaches Media Archaeology of Visual Strategies. In her doctoral dissertation
project, she renegotiated the concept of persona across popular music and contemporary performing arts through the methodological
lens of fandom. She currently threads this research trajectory into an exploration of how pop music (concert) practices permeate
into contemporary performance contexts, by developing an understanding of the notion of 'trackmaturgy'. As a dramaturge, Tessa
has been charting her practice through her collaboration with oester, a music-based transdisciplinary platform for encounters
across sound, performance, and visual arts.
