Emotional Space: Performing the Resistive Possibilities of Torch Singing

Torch songs are standards—musical forms and formulas that recount the pain and suffering of unrequited love. But torch songs are also sites—interpretive spaces waiting to be filled by a performance. As such, torch singing is at once a product and producer of action—a site for concerted connection, deliberation, and contention. The resistive possibilities of a song of unrequited love are generated in the singing, in how a performance of a standard creates new spaces, new movements, and new meanings.