The Show Must Go On

I went to see Jerome Bel’s “The Show Must Go On” at Sadler’s Wells last night. It’s a 2001 work, but I hadn’t heard about it. The concept is a series of apparently unconnected tableaux involving a large cast of performers — exhibiting different degrees of apparent dance–training — set to pop music played by a lackadaisical “sound guy” sat at sound decks at the front.

Basically, each tableau is more or less a piss take in the context of the music, for example the entire cast standing completely still, staring at the audience during David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”, bursting into vigorous school disco–style dancing at unexpected moments. There are a number of common themes to the targets for mockery. One comprises examples of excessive sentimentality in popular culture, including for example Lionel Ritchie (deliberately crap ballet dancing pastiche to “Ballerina Girl”), the final scene from Titanic (Celine Dion plays as the cast stages deliberately crap recreation of that scene on the bow of the ship as the stage sinks away) and Roberta Flack (cast stand quietly singing the words to “Killing Me Softly” as they keel over and pretend to die, eventually all lying motionless on the floor like the victims of a firing squad as the music plays on to the end). Another ridicules the Euro disco scene (inevitably dated, these elements, given the time elapsed since 2001), for example “I Like to Move it, Move it” (cast perform disturbing repetitive movements in the manner of the severely mentally ill) and “The Macarena” (entire cast simply do the Macarena — which I suppose only has to be performed in order to be lampooned).

Many of the audience are chuckling away at the absurdist images; some of them bopping along to the catchy music, but for the most part I wasn’t laughing. Who’s he taking the piss out of here? Isn’t it all of us dickheads in the audience? There is no attempt to connect: right to the curtain call, the performers remain in personae, aloof from the audience. The final joke is when, just after the applause has completely stopped (a standing ovation from some quarters), the cast come back out. The audience, caught out, stops getting up to leave and applauds again. Meanwhile, a woman of a certain age a few seats down from us in the audience echoes the first few movements of the Macarena, as she attempts to remember them. For a work that on a superficial level is comedic, I am afraid that I left feeling strangely bleak. Maybe that’s the point. Or maybe I was just in a bad mood.

Other reactions: Guardian / Dance Insider / NY Times.

Labels: contemporary dance