The kinesthetics of rock music performance: an examination through performativity, masculinity, and Nick Cave

Abstract

Nick Cave's dance and vocal performances entranced audiences in the punk rock scene that developed around St. Kilda's Crystal Ballroom, in Melbourne, Australia, during the late 1970s and early 1980s. This study examines some of the ways of reading Cave's performance styles in the context of the scholarly debates over the politics of rock, gender and sexuality, especially as these debates have been framed by postmodernism. The study argues that the critique of normative Australian rock masculinities embodied in Cave's dance and vocalisation techniques can be best understood through a recently developed aspect of performance theory that some scholars have labelled a kinesthetics of gender and sexuality. Moreover, such a critique can be interrogated through the trace of queer ephemera and the residues of excess that remain long after Cave's performance gestures and choreographies were enacted. I conclude that Cave's performance of a straight form of queemess displays an ambiguity that thrilled fans at the same time that it provoked the normatively gendered sensibilities of those in the broader spaces of Australian pub rock.