Why do we actually want to see blood so much? That's what I wondered during the performance Roughhouse. This American-German piece is showing in the Holland Festival (Wednesday 12 June still) and in it there is no blood. That's also what it's about. That blood no longer flows anywhere, in the media, in art. That everyone always gets up again, that no one is really affected by anything anymore, and that everyone then profiles himself or herself as a victim of something or someone. Read: #metoo, read: identity politics.
All performed by actors and dancers with truly divine bodies, great movement talent and also a speech technique that betrays perfect training. High art, in other words. And laugh-out-loud funny too. With a touch of Oresteia for the much-needed classical underpinning of it all. Extremely entertaining, and it got me effortlessly through my midnight dip, that dip that invariably manages to put me to sleep during the commercials after the eight o'clock news, even when I'm not sitting in front of the TV.
Invulnerable
Nothing wrong with it, then, with Richard Siegal's Roughhouse. And so that is exactly what is wrong with it. The acts are perfectly timed, except for that one time when a dancer scrapes a dancer's nose with his head, after which she falls out of character a little steerily and very briefly. Only to continue full on again. This performance bites itself in the tail, by being exactly what it claims to be about: we are invulnerable and therefore nothing touches us anymore.
That's why the performance doesn't touch you, which is a pity, as a spectator. Because you want to be touched, but not so hard that you become an accomplice to serious crimes. A few years ago, another american almost managed to do that, by saying during the premiere which I saw in Vienna actually put himself and his colleagues in danger. This involved real booze, real leeches, real drugs and real ecstasy. Not to be sustained, it turned out: a month later in Amsterdam, everything was smoothed over and no more risks were taken. As a result, that performance had lost its raison d'être, because that raison d'être was precisely the danger.
We are, it seems, once again saddled with a crisis of realism. How real should art be, how sensational do we want it to be, how hard do we want to touch and be touched? Then you can make something like Roughhouse, but thus run the risk of promising things you can't offer and thus only be left with a form of soft porn. So should there be more real violence in theatre? Should Marina Abramovic back in time, must Angelicia Liddell more than just putting an aesthetic dancer's finger in her sex? Doing sex with squids?
Or should we return to the psychological, to the narrative, to the fantasy that also drove the Mahabharata and the Greek tragedies?
I wonder.
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