I was intrigued to hear that an audience of 50 would sit on the stage to watch a dance-event billed as "a farcical black comedy inspired by migration and cultural identity", which concerned itself with the emotions of people confronted by 'the system'.
Arriving on the stage we were asked for our nationality, and I was given a sticker with EU on it. We were then handed folding stools which were fixed to our wrists with plastic ties, and marshaled here and there by "a strict master of ceremonies". Talking almost ceaselessly and incomprehensibly over a muffled sound system, he told us we were the slowest moving audience he had ever encountered, spouted a whole series of possibly significant dates - "Berlin, neunzehnhundertzweiundachtzig bis neunzehnhundertvierundneunzig" - (non German-speakers won't even have known what they were), and eventually handed us a multiple-choice survey to complete containing such questions as "do you have trouble urinating?". Risking never being released from my stool, I wrote on mine "this is crap and I won't do it!" bringing myself into conflict with 'the system'.
You may wonder what the dancers did. They ran up and down, sort of wrestled with each other, stood about a lot as we moved our stools, lay on the floor twitching, and at the end formed a human pyramid with one girl wobbling on top. At one point a man used another as a ventriloquist's dummy and made him screech. That's as near as we got to humour.
I have always suspected that getting the audience to participate is a sign that you're running out of ideas. In this piece, probably a third of the 75 minutes was spent moving the audience around or haranguing us, and in the rest there was nothing discernible of the promised political and sociological comment, and not a lot of entertainment either. I was not the only person who refused to applaud this pretentious, irritating nonsense.
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