The worst performance EVER

With my chum Kasia we saw the WORST performance one evening two months ago in London. I don't think that there's a need to name the place or the group. We agreed wholeheartedly on its badness. In future it will be our reference: "That show was bad but it wasn't as bad as THAT show."

Then pressed by another friend to explain what we thought was so bad, we floundered for words. I suggested that this was a task we could persist in. What made something bad, SO bad? Took us a little while to get it together between two countries, continuing via comments on each other's text, but here it is now.

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K: To be in a really administrative language: lack of investigation, lack of depth in the movement itself.

S: My first words were useless, meaningless, obvious, amateurish, literal, cliched!  Unfortunately I know that these are really not very concrete.

K: It was cheesy. I said cliched!

S: I said it last night too! Double cliche. Double cheeseburger. Yuck. But these words don't actually tell us very much. I'm still very frustrated.

K: It was embarrassing. Didn't you feel embarassed? Don't you feel that when you watch bad work?

S: A news review once said that about one of my best friend's work in Singapore. Later she won an award in Prague for that same work.

K: Really? Well S.N. loved the show last night.

S: She loved some things about it.

K: She only disliked some things about it. As opposed to us hating the whole thing. I felt so uncomfortable that I had to go on twitter, online on my phone because I didn't want to watch what was happening.

S: It was cringeworthy. But the piece before it was cringeworthy in a very intelligent way. (Bravo!)
In contrast, horrible shows like that second piece are pretty much the only times that provoke me to resorting to the vocabulary of traditional dance composition studies.

K: I know what you mean. Maybe that’s because it seems like they might have made it with a choreographic handbook in hand? (Not Burrows though... ) And it read like a choreographic handbook too.

S: First, my pet peeve. It was so OBVIOUS. In case they didn't announce the theme into the mic, they danced it, they mimed it, they said it again and again. Without much development or elaboration. Well...what's the rest of the show for?

K: Has it also struck you that they were almost always facing us (the audience)? Yet they were looking completely past us... One of the things I dislike most in theatre.

S: The physical vocabulary was predictable. Really packed-with-cliches literal and predictable stuff. A text about the enforcement of prudish social mores: a naked dancer is looked at disapprovingly by clothed companions who grab her, paint her, and clothe her. There are several scenes where the dancers pretend to be embarrassed about being naked and try to cover themselves up. The naked girl returns and there is a fuss about trying to get her to keep her dress on. Next section, a text about futility in capitalist working culture. Dancers make repetitive working gestures and conform, thanks to surveillance by boss.

It was 30 minutes of a sort of lousy pantomime without going deeper to examine the illustrative cliches, comment on them or contrast them.

K: Question is: how do you dig? What is your way for digging deeper Sze? Do you let things take their own course as you improvise around the subject and see what unfolds? Do you transfer questions onto different aspects of life? I just don’t know...

S: Digging! I mean reflection, development, tension.... The music use too, was really cliched, it was a bit of a silent film where the orchestration mickey moused the action or vice versa.

K: Well put...

S: And it was incoherent. The scenettes were just two of something like seven or eight "stories". Generally on the theme of anti-neoliberal frustration. They were rarely linked, but they weren't very juxtaposed either.  Or do I mean too coherent.

Gratituous spectacle. I am generally all for running around naked. I am all for body paint and powder and wrecking the stage. But wield these sacred tools judiciously and wisely! They easily lose their impact. Or maybe they are the medium and the language of the universe that you are creating, they might mean something. They might influence the texture of the movement...
["Nudity is no more neutral than a large hat" - Jonathan Burrows. ]

I wanted to leave so many times but I kept trying to find something redeeming. Something surprising or at least mildly interesting.

K: I do admire you for that. I must admit I stopped trying pretty early on...

S: It didn't have any of the following - of which I'd like to think that I am a proponent of not thinking that any of these are necessary to a performance when there is a strong idea or aesthetic.

1. Pretty dancing - I am really not a pretty dancing person. I am the first one to jump at working with pedestrian movement and performers who haven't been poisoned in a conservatoire (unlike me). But I can watch that in the absence of anything else. In this case... absent! It was ugly...and it wasn't even authentic! It was so overdone!

K: Do you think that what this performance was, was due to the fact that they were in fact non dancers (which could have been honest and beautiful) desperately trying to create a piece which could be read as dance. That it was desperate in their attempt to fall into a category of “physical theatre” - gosh i really don’t know. It’s mind boggling...

S: 2. Pattern. Even the most unspectacular elements would make for me a genius composition if thoughtfully patterned. Repeated, alternated, varied, progressed... which brings me to

3. Arc or trajectory. Whether in narrative, energetic quality, or visual richness, Rhythm of the show?

4. Tension/Irony (as I said earlier about not digging or reflecting deeper).

S: If you can't do any of these... at least 4. some surprise? Please? Even if it's the surprise that you stick to your guns and never change a pattern that nobody dreamed that they'd be able to watch for 60 mins? (Maguy Marin. Xavier le Roy. Yes.)

K: At least the performers were completely committed and spent the whole time really trying to make it work. Bless them.

S: Bless these guys at the Edinburgh Fringe. Really.

K: A last word: to be brave and perform a piece of work of your own, to take it on stage where work is mostly harshly criticised and have guts to be feisty and proud about it - I RESPECT THAT! More than I ever do.