Dance Nation or In Flight Towards Sincerity

This show is fucking fantastic.

Dance Nation is broadly about group of teenage dancers in the run-up to a competition. There is a competition for the part of Gandhi and the Spirit of Gandhi in the dance that could take them all the way to the finals in Florida. But the plot is sort of Bring It On meets Big Mouth: the competition narrative really only there to allow an expansive canvas of teenage experience, sometimes through scenes, sometimes through monologues, sometimes through movement.

And it’s so fucking great.

All the teenagers are played by adults of varying ages – all women bar one bearded man. And what I think this allowed was a sort of anti-representational naturalism: we were never supposed to really believe that these weren’t teenage girls, but we also weren’t supposed to believe the opposite. We never laughed at the juvenile characters’ words, they were always embedded within the jokes but in a really sympathetic way, and so we were able to be simultaneously older-than and the-same-age-as these characters who are young, searching, and uncynical.

I found it really confusing to figure out what Quentin Letts hated about it (how does that man not see that he’s the bad guy in the story of modern culture?) because it seems to straddle radical performance and “proper” theatre really successfully. There was a scene where Zuzu, the “second-best dancer” – but the one whose ambition since she was two was to be the best in the world – is confronted by her best friend Amina – and a dancer who is, it seems objectively, a better dancer. Zuzu mentions her idea of applying to a programme in Pittsburgh and Amina mentions a dance programme in Russia. The tiny unintentional one-upmanship perfectly modelled that vicious, destructive self-denial that we all experience when faced by someone who is just better than us at the thing we love most: it was so deft, subtle, dramatic. It is a beautifully constructed scene with all the meat of what I imagine Quentin Letts would think of as a really great play, so I guess what he didn’t like was really that it was just two young women? was that it? I really honestly can make neither head nor tail.

And outside of the brilliant drama of the scenes there are these sparkling, strange, shaky dance sequences, where no-one is pretending they are magnificent trained dancers, they are sort of gesturing at the idea of being a dancer, a past dancer that might have been, it’s magnetic to watch and feels like such a fervent choice on the part of the director, where others might have tried to trick an audience into imagining these people were really wonderfully composed dancers.

I loved Dance Nation. It’s the best thing I’ve seen in London in ages. It made me think such warm, big thoughts about growing-up, about the costs and pains of that experience, the particularity of that experience [which I guess is quite something as I’ve never been to a dance class and I’m not even nearly an American teenage girl]. But Dance Nation managed to be angry, ebullient, while occasionally veering close to the nostalgic, the sincere – a mode against which I think British theatre is constantly in flight. It made me think sincerely about my own adolescence: about what I missed, what I’ve forgotten, what I misread and misunderstood, that now seems so important to how I got to the present.

There is a wonderful monologue towards the end about a girl who can remember being able to fly, who really could, quite unapologetically and not at all figuratively, fly – but who forgets this ability as an adult. It was heartbreaking to hear: “the coolest thing I ever did, and I forgot it.”

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Dance Nation is on at The Almeida Theatre until some time in the future – I'm not your effin calendar go look it up you mug.

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A year after starting the blog here, I realised that Blogger is quite an unaccountably shit site and I wanted a prettier one, so I've moving to a Wordpress over here. Please do follow me there.

Cheap Essays: Protagonist Culture

Protagonist culture.

What I mean by this is culture in which you become the locus of attention, you become the protagonist in the narrative of the world, the telos. Rather than looking at objects, we think of the objects as looking at us. This finds its apotheosis in the internet and social media: an interconnected web in which I am its centre, a sprawling matrix – a simulacrum of the world – in which we are the gravitational axis.

In the world, we don’t matter. But in the internet we have our own page, our own fanbase, every connection we see is made to us, every foreign word is translated into our own, every advert is perfectly primed to make us see ourselves more clearly, and every instant of our lives is rendered ordered and recogniseable: a wondrous panopticon, constantly shifting depending on where we put our attention.

It’s a beautiful thing, social media. And while it does serve to connect people – to allow people to communicate openly and instantaneously, the primary reason it has succeeded is because it allows us to curate our own personal narrative, our own experience of the world – always partial, always private, always and for everyone, unique.

So far, so… well… every cultural theorist ever.

But I wonder whether this is what attracts people to particular kinds of cultural experience, specifically immersive theatre. I’ve been to a couple of immersive theatre experiences over the past few years – I guess probably everyone who has ever claimed to be interested in theatre has been to them as well (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the majority of them have been gifts from kind, well-meaning friends and family who are not involved in the theatre). I’ve always been suspicious.

I think immersive theatre has its head more firmly turned towards a theme park ride, than theatre. And is precisely of the kind of thrill that rollercoasters offer: whoosh, your body is being flung around and this experience in this part of the ride is yours and yours alone, and though you might be on rails that are strictly controlled, you are in your body – the flinging of you is what matters for this brief moment. One might think of the rise of video-games as offering the same sort of relief to a sudden painful realisation that you are not really that important: here’s a narrative where the world is everything it never will be, there you go, run free.

So, too in an immersive environment: you are what matters, your good time matters, your body is the locus of our attention, and though you are the puppet being led through a controlled environment, ignore that for a while and feel the thrill of being all you.

In a piece of immersive theatre (and I wonder too whether part of the attraction of certain kinds of fourth-wall-breaking theatre where the audience becomes within the play, cf gig-theatre) you are never asked to do anything more than be yourself and allow yourself to become a part of the story, to become a protagonist.

Which stands in direct contradiction with theatre: where the locus of attention is so determinedly not you. Is so determinedly somewhere else, so determinedly not of your world, where you are not the protagonist nor even a bit-part, and you have to accept that you are just one node in a matrix that doesn’t really have much of a centre, and certainly does not spin around you.

I’m not sure I want to conclude that this makes it better. Or worse. Or that social media is bad for us. Or even that we are wrong to want any of this. I really like rollercoasters a lot and I use twitter all the time. But… well, I’m suspicious, I suppose and this explains – to me at least – why my suspicions about immersive theatre and what it’s doing are less inchoate and more based on a cultural model of which I am also suspicious.

Let me know if you have any thoughts.

Oh, and don’t go and see immersive Great Gatsby or else you are a tory. Theeend.

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A year after starting the blog here, I realised that Blogger is quite an unaccountably shit site and I wanted a prettier one, so I've moving to a Wordpress over here. Please do follow me there.

Pity

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I loved Pity. I loved it an inexpressible amount and though I’m about to do some expressing, it will come nowhere near to expressing how wonderful I found it.

This is a piece of theatre that should not exist – it should have been dramaturged out of existence, it should have been remoulded into a more shapely structure, it should be calmer and cooler, it should have a necessary scene explaining how we should feel or what we should do, it should do more, it should be shorter, it should be cheaper, it should be simpler and more streamlined, it shout be pithy and about something, it should be quieter, it should be on somewhere else, somewhere smaller, somewhere less exposed, somewhere on the fringes.

But it’s downstairs at the Court. And it’s fucking nuts.

It starts in a town with a bunch of gags about it being basically the kind of small shithole in which Britain excels itself, to which a woman has moved, annoying her father no end. Her father is then struck by a big comic-book lightning bolt and dies and it only gets stranger from there. A department store explodes. The prime minister sings about sandwiches. The town descends into chaos and chaos reigns in manic, Technicolor strobe-lit techno.

Every time you think, I’ve had enough, the show gives you more ­­– it twists every direction you think it would be too far to twist. It is gift after gift, a surfeit of visual and auditory gifts. There’s far too much, a pile of objects onstage spilling out, collapsing onto itself, repeating and bursting at the seams until it makes you hanker after somewhere else, some other place, some other destination, an interval, something.

There’s a phrase people talk about with scenes where they “circle the drain”, meaning that they aren’t going forward they are just sort of going on and on and don’t know how to finish. I think the critical pushback from this play is that kind of response: “if only it had been a bit less itself”. But so many plays are less themselves and are fucking tedious as fuck. Whereas this has a generosity and an actual courage that it seems to me is so rare in contemporary theatre outside the Fringes.

Sam Pritchard is a miracle. As is Chloe Lamford. As is Rory Mullarkey. It’s a miraculous production. Consistently surpassing itself and just willing you to have the inevitable response that it is itself critiquing. The play is about the world as a mess and a culture of lunacy and repetition, of repetition and mimetic culture. Where every object is fungible, every response codifiable, every instinct on a visual and simultaneous plane, never corresponding to the past nor the future, always in the present.

There is an extraordinary moment towards the end of the play where a postal worker has a monologue about her family being dead but continuing to deliver the post every day, without fail, to nobody. It is beautiful and harrowing and sincere. It is some of the finest writing I’ve ever seen in the theatre. I cannot believe that people think that someone who wrote this monologue did not know what they were doing in the rest of the play, did not anticipate and desire your response to be “enough, already”.

The show activates for an audience the bits of their brains that want a meme and use it to create a piece of theatre that deconstructs that desire and its devastating impact on our world. This is a paean to human idiocy: a death-march to a culture that thinks itself invincible because it has been decaying for so long.

It made my year.

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A year after starting the blog here, I realised that Blogger is quite an unaccountably shit site and I wanted a prettier one, so I've moving to a Wordpress over here. Please do follow me there.

Mechanimal

There’s a man onstage and he’s pretending to be a bird. He’s trying to fly and he’s attempting birdsong and he’s migrating to the city. He’s throwing feathers in the air and jumping off a box. He’s cooing and bouncing around the stage.

There is always a weird moment in the theatre at the Fringe when you say to yourself “is this a joke?” Often it isn’t and you’ll have to find some way to muster a sincere response to something that you have found quite moronic, which is hard but can sometimes be quite rewarding – there are plenty of shows that have started with my “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.” that have ended up under my skin – and while I’m convinced that Mechanimal was aware of its silliness –because a bearded man pretending to be a bird is funny and all the stoney-faced audience members in Zoo needed a reminder of that, in my opinion – once I moved past that silliness  the show opened up for me.

It appeared to me to be about trying to decentre the human within the narrative. There was a story about researchers on birds who study their navigation via the stars and their measuring and recording their birdsongs and noticing the ways in which human interventions in the environment like cities and artificial light have damaged the birds’ natural capacities. But the piece did a neat trick of centring not on the researcher, but the birds – and metatheatrically putting the audience in the position of the researchers and the performer, or the performer attempting-to-be-bird, in the position of the bird (or maybe the human who desires to be more birdlike). I don’t know really. It seems to me a lot more complicated the further I get from it.

But I think what I felt really satisfied by was that I seemed to, in a really fascinating trick, have learned loads. Without having a boring scene where two people talk about birds and their flight-patterns, the piece made me genuinely interested in the environmental impact on birds and informed me, while offering some really complex theatrical tricks.

I liked it a lot.

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A year after starting the blog here, I realised that Blogger is quite an unaccountably shit site and I wanted a prettier one, so I've moving to a Wordpress over here. Please do follow me there.