Careering from career to career

It’s all one long Opening Ceremony

There seems a marked and growing disinclination to separate genuine in–depth theatrical skills and the results therefrom, from attention-seeking theatricality.
As a result we have more and more bad theatre masquerading as meaningful.

This amplification is further exacerbated by the new dance/alternate circus “sector’ weighing in with their inconsequential, backwards justified and solipsistic philoso-lite explorations of just about any theme from mother-rape to hairy-eyeball syndrome with all stops between.

Much of which, unless accompanying Mozart, Bartók or Janácek in a bewildering aray of anachronistic absurdist vignettes which more often than not, damage the composers' original and carefully wrought themes beyond repair and certainly the audience’s comprehension - is defined by extraordinarily banal, derivative and poorly performed rrrrrrrock muzik, accompanied by fun-fur clad frenzies bellowing backwards-Latin atop swaying poles.

While this is all very diverting and occasionally rent-paying for said swayers and decibel peddlars, a passing Lepage, Sellers or sundry other Magnificent Pretender who can then find expensively costumed ways to shoe-horn this dross into many of their conceits, it does very little for the development either of genuine and evolutionarily creative theatrical notions or the ability to distinguish between the talented and the noisesome.

The gradual and necessary development of an aesthetic, informed by skill, taste, experience and depth, the evolution of vocabularies of choreographic movement-design, the great arts and myths of circus and commedia and the important archaic truths buried beneath the behemoth of Operatic structures, fall increasingly into the thrall of the perilous, the untalented and the ill-informed as they continue to hurl themselves, with quantities of jejune abandon, artlessness and tendentious posturing, headlong into the Yarts via a loose grounding and the occasional Awayday Course in Capoeira Klowning.

It is now a recognised career-choice development process to be splurged out of one of the contemporary dance schools with a requisite Ology in Whatever, struggle around in the shallows of the Dependent Dance sector until the money, the ideas, the relief yoga/pilates teaching and/or sofa-surfing opportunities dry-up, then schlepp off to one of the Walloonian and Nether-outlandish Opera companies where much subsidised cavorting in twelve nippled fat-suits and bald-wigs to conceptual-Mozart in bad lighting will prevail.

This is to be followed by the development of a couple of sidelines in Yoga and the Poetics of Circo-Alternativo, breathlessly absorbed at the knee of some gnomish juggling academics in personality specs who have spent a winter Existentialist-Kino Lab with Derevo and have testimonials from Slava Polunin on the wall of tastefully furnished and well-funded Circus Spaces from Turin to Alma-Ata.

What is perhaps more alarming is that this extraordinarily unfocused curate’s-egg of what is ever more loosely termed, “skills”, is increasingly being employed at the highest level of the theatrical world.

Not only is the Emperor butt-naked, but the crows have begun to peck at his eyes.
In the absence of well-read and clearly assimilated classical sources and precedents, a growing coterie of Sunday supplement creatives are half new-minting the old as their own genuine novel discoveries.
This simulateneously impoverishes tradition, historical perspective, precedent, evolution and their own credibility as anything more than pretentious, ignorant arrivistes - in the kingdom of the increasingly myopic, the one-eyed will prevail - for a time.

However, this seems to be “where its at” for the theatrical career strategist.
One whose entire research background extends to a couple of afternoons on Youtube and a Uni-lite reading list.

This person has identified that the 21st century Prole appetite for Fries and Circuses is morphing into a voracious and indiscriminate consumption of creative projects, Events and Spectaculars running the gamut from Britney Spears The Opera to Olympic Opening ceremonies, accompanied as they often are, by yards of windy academically self-referential theoro-technocratic guff and supported by Sponsors or their advertising –industry panderers.

Dance in particular, opera in general and theatre in its broadest sense, are all the more impoverished for this appallingly prevalent, arriviste, lightweight and erroneous view of both the form and function of theatre. Accompanied as it is, by a conspiracy for the studied downplaying of discreet expertise, depth or learning, accompanied by a worrying inability to tell the difference between creativity and increasingly high-profile valueless activities which merely look like they ought to be creative, owing to a lethal cocktail of ignorance, arrogance, ill-education and commercial interest.

Effete, effort and rose flavoured windiness

One of things which attracted me to becoming a dancer, apart from the fact that I would get to physically interact with lithe, dangerous and sexy human beings waaaaay bfore I was qualified or had earned the chops - was its unique combintion of muscularily, controlled power and sculptural formation. I saw in this combination of means, extra opportunity to go to places psychologically and emotionally in a way far more direct and unequivocal than words and symbols could never reach

PINA BAUSCH - A tribute

PINA BAUSCH dies suddenly -
One of the few, true 20th Century Choreographic greats dies of cancer June 28th 2009.

I was personally completely heartbroken to hear the news of Pina Bausch's premature and sudden death at 68.

The small clip from her Sacre de Printemps has been visited 400,000+ times at Youtube alone, providing an insight into just how important she was to the dance world and the wider world of the arts.

She was unique and her passing leaves a yawning gap in the modern dance landscape.

So much of what she pioneered has gone on to be pastiched, reheated and drearily re-rolled in ever less vibrant and innovative ways by countless pale-imitators.

Too many of these have confused Ms Bausch's incisive musical and physical statements about the human condition with the un-dressing of tortured looking men and women in torn underwear and hedge-backwards hair.

This has managed to make an alarmingly large section of modern dance making, one of the few truly original 20th century artforms, look more and more like under-rehearsed concerts by Tourettes Formation Ballroom teams, by mistaking Bausch's forms for her content, and leaving the all too important audiences trailing in the wake with increasingly bemused indifference.

Who, in our current crop of physical-dance theatre creatives will have the chops to step-up, assume her mantle and take things forward again with the same quality and level of innovation?

Perhaps you have a view? Let me know your thoughts.