Cut the Damn Camera

Yesterday I went to see the dance theatre project "Underground" at the half-finished subway station "Reichstag". The piece is based on the nonfiction book by Murakami about the sarin attack of the Aum Shinrikyo sect in the Tokyo subway 1995. The press release sounded vaguely interesting. Afterwards, I decided to skip dance theatre for a while, it seems to be a self-important scene which makes points of numbing banality over and over. The show starts with all dancers getting on stage (i. e. the subway platform) and almost everybody doing a lengthy karaoke number, which is apparently supposed to symbolize that emotions and experiences in late capitalist society are becoming ever more structured by the mass media, resulting in narcissism, alienation and loss of true communication. Accordingly, heavily symbolic song titles were chosen: "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me" and "Satisfaction", which, of course, have something to do with the aggressivity, alienation and loss of orientation in our society. Then they sang a song about the lack of true communication in the modern world, guess which? Yes, exactly, it was "Sounds of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel. The rest was just as bad, everything that makes the book vaguely interesting, i. e. the specificity of the event, of Tokyo, of Aum, was reduced to cliché, replacing analysis by the mysterious workings of destiny. And of course they had that unavoidable video camera-cum-projection screen. Every darn theatre production in this town absolutely has to have at least a few scenes doubled by video projection, which, as the directors and such don’t fail to point out, has something to do with emotions and experiences in late capitalist society becoming ever more structured by mass media, resulting in a rise of narcissism, voyeurism, alienation and loss of immediate communication. Besides, somebody might be shocked, because theatre is supposed to be high-brow and video is supposed to be low-brow, so there, we’re being subversive. Okay, thank you so much, but we really got the message now, and nobody is that shocked anymore, honestly! Would you mind doing something else now, please? But they’re already busy hatching the next plot about alienation in media society, wallowing in vapid entropy. They're all from Golgafrincham is what they are.