""๐๐๐๐ฅ๐ข๐ญ๐ฒ ๐ซ๐๐ฆ๐๐ข๐ง๐ฌ ๐ฎ๐ง๐๐๐๐๐๐ญ๐๐""
aka ROTTEN feat. Young Boy Dancing Group
Your earnest bullshit gives me the ick.
Years ago ~ the documentary Hypernormalisation by Adam Curtis made quiiite an impression on me.
One sequence in particular.
Curtis describes how Putin had used Surkov to enact a kind of surrealist Russian theatre of politicsโฆ that created inertia simply by confusing people. By funding the extreme right and extreme left, announcing bold policies that were never enacted, and conducting surprise extra-judicial punishments, by never quite letting the landscape stabilise, their strategy created an unreality, a sense of fragile fluidity designed to demoralise. What was the point of fighting for something, or opposing it? Tomorrow it would all be different anyway.
Now, of course ~ this is perfectly normal.
Your eyes deceive you, and no one is to be trusted. There is no one single narrative; the only people sure of themselves are the idiots.
Filth and fatalities that you used to have to dig for now stream directly into your feed, conveniently in time for breakfast, next to an ad to upgrade your iPhone. Itโs easy to be a doomer.
But Iโm not.
Maybe Iโm just lucky. Iโve never succumbed to the negativity, not in the slightest. The point at which I could have dipped into misanthropy, become a forever hater, let the rage and grief curdle me into a mess ~ instead I tripped, slipped and fell into absurdism.
At leastโฆ my own version of it.
Youโve noticed it, yes? That the silent universe has wicked humour. The villains win, the cute kids get annihilated; my married friends blow up their lives, my sluttiest friends turn wifey. The very thing you fear is what you call in, the very thing you most want is is ~
In the void, we must find our own happiness, one must imagine Sisyphus LOLโing, etc. Itโs the reason I find the worthiness that has infected art so painful; its earnestness, its joyless lectures making neither great art nor great activism.
The responsibility of the creative act is not to tidy things up.
Whatโs really destroying art? Heat sinks in the desert, and GPUs? Nah. The endless need to name a culprit, play the victim, make it all so meaningful.
No wonder when the techbros come for the training data I just shrug.
At least entropy is an honest aesthetic.
Whatโs this got to do with Young Boy Dancing Group? perhaps you are asking, searching for the unsubscribe button. YBDG, who I have waited years to see?
Well ~ seeing them, courtesy of Soft Centre, I realised there is something rotten at the core. Dark mysteries from the psyche, buried beneath the spectacle. Dig under the classically-inspired playfulness and clowning and the jokes and the wax and the lasers in assholes and theyโre showing us something horribly true.
Back in 2014, Young Boy Dancing Group debuted at Silencio ~ (a fabulous David Lynch-designed venue indelibly seared in my memory as the gold-flecked Parisian nightclub where a drunk acquaintance pissed in the corner then fell asleep in it). They didnโt even have a name back then, but have since refined and perfected a syncretic approach that isnโt made for stages, but built for warehouses and nightclubs ~ performance art as demanded by the now, and the internet.
In one corner, a figure is prostrate, covered in the wax from melting candles; over the course of the performance they move through improvised sequences that culminate in wild tableaux.
In one sequence, performers are puppeteered by the asshole, in another, dragged over a wet floor by the strappy harness. The layers of performance are built up and stripped away, at times refined, at others raw and animalistic, touching a part of you that craves permission.
The dissonance creates a certain hypnotism, a gentle violence, focused by a few soul-tweaking visuals.
Some call it sensationalist. I think of it more as a reverse-scapegoat: the sin re-entering the village.
In format, YBDG are a travelling troupe (in this instance Manuel Scheiwiller and Maria Metsalu) working with local performers in each destination. They are of this place and also not; an invasion, an infection, impregnating the psyche of the city.
And what is this mind-virus?
In a rare interview, they describe the work as intimate, a global intimacy spree, the cue that most critics pick up on, that people unpick on Reddit. But this is intimacy without earnestness. Instead, an intimacy to simply be seen as you are. Despite the guile and the layers of archness, a demonstration of what it means to allow your own rot to be seen. That
I AM ROTTEN AND WISH TO BE SEEN AS I AM
and so gorgeous Ange Halliwell tracks are cued over depraved elegance.
Witnessing this work I truly believe the absurd. That we can be together in our beauty and our filth. We can be disgusting and yet still loved. Weโre big enough to hold it all, even if you need an outsider to remind you.
In Hungarian thereโs a saying, their equivalent of โyou canโt have your cake and eat itโ, which is delightfully so much more lurid. They say:
๐๐๐ข ๐๐๐โ๐ก โ๐๐ฃ๐ ๐๐๐กโ ๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐กโ๐ ๐๐ ๐ ๐๐๐ ๐ฆ๐๐ข๐ ๐ ๐๐ข๐ ๐๐ โ๐๐๐ฃ๐๐.
And one way or another, so we are taught. But ~ we can. And we will.
One must resist doomerism, resist earnestness.
Embrace absurdity.
The people I have been closest to have become my enemies; my real friends always surprise me; every day, the world serves up mirrors for myself, every time I think Iโve moved on, no! there I am, in another place, but still on the same spiral.
Whoever you are, whatever youโre going throughโฆ believe me:
Up close it might be sad, but from a distance itโs fucking hilarious.
The universe is not indifferent, itโs telling jokes at our expense; its twisted irony is just a reflection. The invitation is to laugh at ourselves.
Laugh at the hope and the pain, the anal lasers. Deep down, theyโre part of the same cosmic absurdity.
Itโs us who make the meaning.
Reality remains undefeated.
.
.
.
Go further:
Young Boy Dancing Group, do not miss a chance to see them once in your life
If you want a more sane perspective, read Sonnet to the Asshole by
.This is also part one of a two-part review of Soft Centre 2025.