252/365: Status
This is a close cousin to yesterday’s essay on Prestige, but while there is some overlap, this is a theatrical concept worth examining on its own.
A couple of years ago, a buddy got me a book on Improv Theater, and inside was a passage that introduced me to the concept of status, as put forth by Keith Johnstone. Simply identifying the dynamic, the author argued, was enough to guarantee Johnstone’s place in history as an important thinker in drama. Frankly, given its applicability to contexts such as magic performance, classroom management and politics, I think the praise might not have gone far enough.
As with Wesley James’s use of the terms “Positive Illusion” and “Negative Illusion”, the really important thing here first is simply to understand that this dynamic exist. Basically, the idea is that by analyzing differences not just in speech, but also mannerisms, body language, style, etc. we can identify differences in status within a shared situation. In other words, simply through the use of subtle cues you can have two people up on-stage and figure out who’s in control, who’s being controlled, and even exact points where the status shifts.
And when I say subtle, I mean exactly that. Johnstone came up with some great insights.
* If you shuffle around on the spot, you’re low status. If you plant your feet, you’re high status.
* If you wander aimlessly, you’re low status. If you move with purpose, you’re high status.
* If you do something for somebody else, you’re low status. If they do something for you, you’re high status.
* If you take up a lot of space, you’re high status. If you try to take up only a little space, you’re low status.
* If other people are moving around you, then you’re high status. If you’re the one moving around, you’re low status.
* If you explain everything as verbosely as possible, you’re low status. If your responses are short and to the point, you’re high status.
* High-status people look wherever they like, with ease. Low-status people will look at high-status people, unless the high-status person looks at them, in which case the low-status person’s attention will shift away.
There are plenty of other examples, but these should be enough to get the point across. Also notice that context might establish nuances that shift things — a panhandler, for instance, will be of lower social status than the rich guy who throws a dollar his way, so even though the panhandler isn’t the one who’s moving and isn’t the one who’s doing something, it’s hard to argue that he’s got higher status than the rich guy. However, if the roles were not so obvious, or if the guy receiving the money was sitting in a chair, and the guy giving it was moving quickly and bowing graciously, you’ve essentially got the same situation (one guy accepting money from another) but what makes the situations feel different is what we intuit from status cues. Notice that through creative use of the above generalizations, you could put your two actors up on-stage and have them go through some basic pantomiming, and you’ll know who’s in control and who’s being controlled. That alone can set up conflict, and a simple reversal of roles could eventually signal a shift in the drama, or perhaps even signal its conclusion.
It also applies to things like social interaction. You’re walking about and don’t know the time, so you approach a stranger and say “Excuse me, do you know the time?” Why are you saying “Excuse me?”, exactly? Perhaps it’s just out of habit, but where did it come from? Because, at that point in time, you’re put the other person in a role that’s subservient to you. They are to stop what they’re doing and give you information that’s important to you. The “Excuse me” basically mollifies that. It doesn’t sound like much, but consider how alternate phrasings of the question, or even how a simple change in tone of voice, can make it feel different to be in a position to answer the question. “What time is it?” “Buddy, I need to know the time.” “You! What time is it?” etc. are all essentially asking the same question, but while it’s obvious that they’re asking it in different ways, it’s difficult to put a finger on why one might feel better or worse than the other. Well, thanks to “status”, it’s a lot easier. It’s one of those things that’s totally obvious once you realize it, but before that point, you’d have to describe it almost through analogy (eg: “It’s like I’m here at his beck and call.” or whatnot).
Once you start thinking in these terms, certain things become a lot easier to understand. Let’s take an extreme example that I’ve used before — again, I offer an apology ahead of time if this seems unnecessarily provocative, but I think it proves the point neatly. The situation… White people are frequently curious as to why black people can call each other “nigger” without reprisal, whereas if the white guy says it, apparently it’s awful. The deal is that the etymology of the term harkens back to a power dynamic in which whites were in charge and blacks were in servitude. When spoken between black people, it has a status-leveling effect. When spoken by a white person in the company of black people, though, it creates status imbalance, and basically raises the status of the white person and lowers the status of the black people. As a white person, I can attest that it’s not impossible to overcome this and have a meaningful and non-alienating discussion with a black person and use the word, but you’ve got to lay a lot of groundwork to make sure that they know that you know just how offensive the word is, not just because it sounds like profanity, but rather because of the status gap that results from its use. To put it another way, you could use nothing but polite language, but simply in your tone of voice, gestures, or other status cues suggest that the black guy is beneath you, and it’d be really bad as well. Racism, more often than not, is about power, and status cue establish not just who’s got the power and who doesn’t, but also establish who thinks they’ve got the power, who thinks they don’t, and whether or not one person thinks the other person should or shouldn’t have that power.
Now, as magicians, it’s tempting to think that we want to claim high status, but a very important point to throw out here straight away, though, is that “high status” doesn’t automatically equal “good”, and “low status” doesn’t automatically equal “bad”. You should consider these things as tools — or, perhaps more accurately, measures of what’s going on in the show. If the show works, then it’s stupid to fix what’s not broken, but if something seems off, then it’s possible that measures of the dynamics might have something to do with it.
The olde blogge has long railed against magicians who don’t plant their feet (and, for some poetic justice, read on to the end of this article), but really, this is most important if the magician is trying to establish themselves as being in control. Usually we are, but every now and then, if you’re in a magician-in-trouble scenario, or in a truly tense situation, in which case you might want to adopt some cues that communicate uncertainty or anxiety, and which in turn may make you seem lower-status than usual. There are other situations as well when you might want to lower your status, or at least be cognisant of the effects of claiming high status. Ever wonder why, when you’re performing for a group of guys, one guy seems to want to take charge of everything and dictate what you’re doing? That’s because the very nature of magic performance casts the performer in incredibly high-status: I’m going to stand here and you’re going to watch me do something impressive, and then you’re going to clap for me and tell me how awesome I am. In other words, you become the alpha dog, and all you need to make things difficult is introduce another alpha dog into the equation to tussle over pack dominance.
This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to cede control. It’s possible to either lower or raise your status in the face of such a challenge, and through finesse and grace make either situation pleasurable for an audience. Shutting a guy down can be either fantastic or cruel, depending upon how it’s handled. Yielding to a guy could either be wise or flaky, again, depending upon how it’s handled. One of the problems with magicians complaining about heckling is that they see it far too one-dimensionally, basically as a sign of disrespect. Now, it may very well be a sign of disrespect, but it’s far wiser for the performer to be prepared to handle it in a way that’s theatrically satisfying. Darwin Ortiz mentions ignoring the heckler and letting the audience grow annoyed with them and essentially have them shut the guy up. That may work for him, but if you’ve ever been in the audience of a stand-up comic getting heckled, and he shuts the guy down, then you know how awesome that can be to witness — to the point that it’s suspected that some comics may plant guys in the crowd to heckle them a certain way just to set up their carefully-crafted heckle-stopping jokes. If you think that’s tinfoil-hattish, just take a look at the extremes that Andy Kaufman went to.
Other things ought to become clear as well when viewed through the lens of status. Why does Gazzo get away with harsh insults when he performs? Some say it’s because they sense he’s joking. I think it’s less about that and more about the fact that watching a guy cast in a low-status role (performing magic on the street for money) claim high-status is incredibly fascinating. This is one of the reasons why you have to be really careful about taking somebody else’s jokes — not only is it artistically questionable, but a lot of the time humour is based around a status dynamic that may be different when you’re the one driving it. To put it another way, Channing Pollock using Gazzo’s lines up on-stage might drive the audience to despise him.
Another scenario you might have encountered — you do a magic trick, it goes over well, and a guy says, “Man, you must do great with chicks. They love magic.” As Jay Sankey pointed out, we usually know that the truth is different, but why do they think that in the first place? Again, the very nature of performance magic suggests, amongst other things, older courtship gestures and even dance, with the guy leading and the girl following. Whether or not it plays out that way is much more random, but the idealized vision of magic performance very much casts the magician in a high-status role, and those about him in a low-status role. It’s one reason why many performers go a long way towards trying to equalize that, through self-effacing humour or magician-in-trouble effects.
It can even be taken to another level, to involve something that Al Schneider once described that I termed “orbits” over at the old Ye Olde. Essentially, it’s this. If you’re holding a ball and you move it all around, the ball seems to diminish in size. If, on the other hand, you hold a ball in place and move around it, it seems to gain in size. Whether or not this is good or bad is secondary to what your aims are. Maybe you want the final load to appear big, and the cup it came from to appear small. Theoretically, it’s possible to establish this by having the load sit where it is (high status) and have the cup move around (low status). More esoteric examples than this might come into play, but that’s already pretty far out there, so I’ll leave that to others to pontificate about.
Finally, a while ago you might remember that I did a five-part series talking about on-stage character case-studies, and I had some blunt opinions about things people might be doing wrong. Well, just to show that turnabout is fair play, I’ve got a video here of me doing a card trick on the street.
I’ll bypass everything what’s working or not working magic-wise, and focus more on the things that are theatrically wrong and need fixing.
* I’m talking too much and too quickly.
* I’m moving around in order to get to other people, rather than have them come to me.
* I’m behind a table, rather than in the center of the group.
* Sometimes I shuffle from side-to-side unnecessarily.
* You could play a drinking game to the number of times I say “Ok?” in the script.
(I’ll discuss elsewhere more about the trick itself, including techniques used and appropriate credits. For right now, though, think of it as a great case-study that shows certain things that you should not do, as well as an affirmation that I truly know how hard it is to stop doing these things.)
In my defense, this was the first chance I’ve had to see myself perform this routine in action, and it’s still very young and raw and in need of refinement, but now that it’s on the record, there’s no excuse not to have a great deal of the above five problems eliminated, the first four of which are at least in part status-related. I’m not unhappy with the slightly manic demeanour, but there’s a difference between being manic in a theatrically-pleasing way, and being manic simply because I don’t know how to slow down. Addressing those four things, along with that lousy excuse for a hat-line, would go a long way towards having a better set and simply being a better presence on-stage. If you’re like me and your background is mostly close-up, viewing your work through Johnstone’s lens of “status” is a real eye-opener, because it goes to show that even if the routining and techniques are fine, you can still be missing something.
Glad to see a magician reference the Johnstone book–it’s a great, great book.
Watching yourself on video can indeed be a brutal experience. I’m still trying to recover from the last time I did it.