Crowd Exposure of Carnival Vs. Solidarity of the Psyche?

I suppose I never really considered the idea of an artist’s performance as an element of cultural change or representation; it has always appeared to me to be highly individual: the singing style of Barbra Streisand, the worship leading of key singers such as Andre Crouch, the personality apparent in Bill Cosby’s comedy. According to ‘The Performance of Culture,’ jazz-related, theatrical, and cultural presentations are presented as another form of Carnival; the author appears to believe that many cultural practices -- weddings and concerts, for example -- are a display that can either reinforce cultural norms or subvert them. The key to the argument appears to be that these performances of group-induced. Although the arguments in the articles we read appear to make sense, I have to question whether jazz artists themselves would put this much thought into their performances. For me, the image of Carnival conjures images of the brightly colored masks, the society-defying behaviors of the participants, and the frenzy of the crowd, which make any carnival celebration a production of the masses. Contrast this with the following article on “Performance in society” in which the author brings about the psychoanalytical element of performance and you have quite a quandary. The fact that performance is both an act of group demonstration and a selected ‘self’ which may or may not differ from the actual self is interesting. One must wonder whether the short films this weekend reflect a mass movement of a culture away from the status quo or if it is truly an outcry of the individual within.

The original premise of several of the articles appears to be that performance “can work within a society precisely to undermine tradition, to provide a site for the exploration of fresh and alternative structures and patterns of behavior” (“The Performance of Culture” 13). My question is, at what point is performance an outcropping of the psyche? How can we discern whether an artist’s performance is him/her being himself/herself or him/her presenting a projected self? To what extent is the performance a self-created persona in relation to one’s true identity (take, for example, Miles Davis’s habit of playing with his back to the audience)? Furthermore, is that projected self a conscious decision to join a mass movement to defy society’s idea of normalcy -- similar to the Carnival analogy -- or is it a self-aggrandizing mechanism? a coping mechanism? a deeply-rooted personality flaw? One tenet of jazz is the individuality of improvisation as apparent in the works of Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis. Were their improvisations the result of a cultural push for equality and justification or were they individually seeking to find themselves? Hmm, questions...

I haven’t quite finished all the articles yet but these are some of the questions I’m finding floating around in this head of mine so....what’s your take on it? Maybe the mention of such conflicting phenomena (Freud, Carnival, etc.) has me thinking. Anybody else have these mental conflicts?