More is Less, Sound is Silence
In a refined luster of muted blue, The Sundance Kid is Beautiful awakens in a soundtrack of andante, crisp, and steady pulses, creating an ambience similar to a wooden fish tapping in a Buddhist temple. Knowles, portraying an autistic child, moves around the stage solo, following a similar, minimalist rhythm—walking, bending, turning, and speaking throughout the performance. However, this composed meter is interrupted by several popular music tracks, one of which being the Frankie Valli’s 1967 classic, “Can’t Take My Eyes off You”.
Knowles played at least four renditions of the song in addition to the original version, ranging from the swinging bossa nova, punk rocky indie, to technical jazz and classical piano. Once Valli’s original began to fade out, these reinterpreted versions joined in periodically and layered on top of one another like a Renaissance motet until all versions of the song are amplified simultaneously, reaching a chaotic finale. In a blend of varying timbres and tempos, the lyrics became impossible to recognize word by word. As an interesting result, this arrangement of soundtracks produced an effect beyond the original context of Valli’s Billboard favorite.
Although the repetitiveness inherits a signature style of Knowles’s production, this particular gesture differentiates from the typical monologues in the audiences’ relationship with the original content. For example, when Knowles repeats, “the Sundance kid is beautiful” by adding more “very” each time towards the end of the play, we expect a slightly longer, but same phrase the next time. While we’re repeatedly reminded of the phrase’s content, our perception no longer focuses on, and is even confused by the semantic content. Instead, the body begins to produce meaning when the language sounds exhausting. The music, on another spectrum, comfortably drew support from the popularity of the song so that even with a diminished clarity of the lyrics, the audiences were sober aware of what those different versions were about. Thus, the added renditions doesn’t vacillate our understanding of the original text that is so deeply ingrained in our heads prior to the performance.
In other words, the new versions of music are not entirely external to the initial version, but are only external as an extended network of communication, dialoging with our consciousness. What’s special about these popular music references is that they are diegetic sounds that Knowles played from the cassette tape recorders. Much like how artists from the “Pictures Generation” utilizes photography to approach the question of proliferation of images in the age of mechanical reproduction, Knowles plays 4 out of more than 200 covers of Valli’s hit to address a similar concern. In a sense, the meaning and the certainty of the “other” versions of the song is ungrounded without the original work. But from another perspective, the added versions together deconstruct the importance of the original by distancing Valli’s work away from the audiences. In a mist of loss and remembrance, we forget to question why the song is chosen by Knowles and how the lyrics serve the greater plot of the performance. The repetitiveness, as an entity, becomes something that isn’t wrapped up in a hullabaloo, and something stable in a sense that it isn’t a constant record of our sensitivity. Almost like the Turkish whirling dance, the music loops as a physical active meditation, moving our attention far away from a world of language, into a world that the Sundance kid silently immerses.