From February 19 through March 21, New York City was taken over by the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival. Twenty productions traversed nine stages and two boroughs, and twenty workshops were held for both trained dancers and novice movers alike. The festival, which aims to showcase risk-taking artists, found one home at BAM’s Harvey Fisher Theater, where I saw “Age of Content,” a post-modern ballet by the Marseille-based company (LA)HORDE.
(LA)HORDE, a collective of dancers based at the Ballet National de Marseille– run by Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer, and Arthur Harel– was an obvious choice for a festival attempting to bridge a gap between old and new. The company’s style is self-described as “post-internet dance” that aims to “deconstruct classist hierarchies between dance aesthetics, influences, and cultures.” (LA)HORDE decodes the digital age, anthropomorphizing the virtual, turning the internet into a dancer. In an unrelenting display of reverence for their source material, ensemble work, repetition, physical confrontation, and power dynamics, “Age of Content” honors the cyberspace, offering audiences both critique and hope within technology’s rapid evolution.
In several distinct sections, the piece felt like swiping through TikTok or advancing through levels of a video game. The evening began with a deconstruction of hivemind culture and clout chasers. A plastic encased car was the first “dancer” to appear, moving around the stage like a dog at Westminster. A (literally) clear symbol of status, the car quickly found itself the subject of domination. When a horde of identical, masked, mint green Juicy Couture clad baddies with double braids – the ghosts of early 2000s past–appeared from a garage door stage right, a member of the hive seduced the machine like it was a customer on OnlyFans. Slow, deliberate, and stripper-like movements then shifted to violence as more and more mint velour clones appeared. In a series of fight choreography, the ensemble punched, kicked, and tossed each other off the roof of the car, all clamoring for the top spot. Like cheerleaders at Berghain, they hit each bump of the techno soundtrack with a raised fist, victorious in their domination of the machine. But, in so doing, they became machines themselves.
In the next tableau, (LA)HORDE took us into a live video game. Moving like characters from “The Sims” or “Street Fighter,” the dancers acted through a series of NPC (non-player character) reactions: laugh, cry, fight, think, etc. Without the ability to touch each other, the ensemble, now dressed in chic, Gen Z– evoking feelings of Demna’s Balenciaga– outfits, expressed fear, curiosity, happiness, and once again, violence, all within a strict digital code. With imaginary guns, the dancers mimed shooting each other, but always got back up. In video games, violence does not have the reality of consequence. Your character simply reappears at the last save point, life meter back to full, ready to try again. (LA)HORDE begs the question, does virtual reality have real world consequences?
Their answer came in the next “swipe” of the piece, the first of the evening to use spoken text. Down center stage, two dancers gestured like animatronics to the spoken lyrics of Alphaville’s “Forever Young.” “Let us die young or let us live forever…do you really want to live forever?” Suddenly, (LA)HORDE revealed the double meaning in their title. “Age of Content” doesn’t merely refer to the endless barrage of content that we are subjected to (and how it defines and changes us), but how we use those forms to sell a version of ourselves that is content and happy. If in digital form we can live forever, is that the answer to happiness? While bio-domination bros like Bryan Johnson are trying their best to make this true of a lived reality as well, do we really WANT to? As we cling to our youth, white knuckling our botox needles, when will we feel content, if ever? For younger generations, the stakes of this proposition are starker.In an increasingly volatile world where a future is not guaranteed, the desire to remain young, via cosmetic surgery and “looks maxxing”, is in part due to being left with two options, at least in my interpretation as an American. Kids can either die in a school shooting at 13, or upload a version of themselves onto the internet and remain immortal. With these optimized avatars, the chronically online generation can live forever, but at what cost? At least the latter of these two options gives them control.
(LA)HORDE contended with this conundrum as the piece progressed. The next scene featured the entire ensemble holding each other only by their mouths. As the dancers paired off, each couple took turns using their hands as muzzles, operating the other like a puppet. What did it mean that the first physical connection of the night was a display of manipulation? If we can’t control our own fate, does that shift to an external outlet, in this case, the other dancers? Some hung upside down, snaking their way down another’s back, while others were held up as if subjected to a medieval torture device. If before, these dancers were products of their digital world, now they were humans within it, searching for and demanding physical connection and control.
From this perch, we were dropped into our next swipe: an ode to beautiful bums. The ensemble bounced each other’s asses like basketballs, caressing each cheek with the cheeks of their faces. In the age of BBLs, are butts stronger identifiers than faces, a la Kim Kardashian? As bodies become digital commodities, especially women’s, who has control over this imagery? As the dancers gyrated upon each other, sensuality on full display, was (LA)HORDE offering a beacon of hope that physical intimacy cannot be replaced, or are we totally cooked?
I can finally reveal myself as a delusional American for which TikTok has become a source of comfort. I found “TikTok Jazz,” the final piece in “Age of Content,” while likely a blistering condemnation of doomscrolling, to be inspiring. As the dancers flew across the stage with plastered on smiles, cycling through viral dances, the entire audience was hypnotized. The almost psychotically repetitive melody of a Philip Glass score, coupled with an equally psychotic amount of referential content– throwing “dabs”, “shoots”, twerking– resulted in a visual lobotomy. An unanticipated sense of joy filled the room, like we were at the altar of social media, honoring the platform like a giddy congregation eager to accept the sacrament of (LA)HORDE’s irreverence. The mood that ended the evening offered a release– palpable throughout the theater– from the tension they had spent so long building and earned a very raucous standing ovation. I was surprised to see such enthusiasm from a notoriously difficult to please New York audience. Consider this New Yorker lowkirkenuinely hypebeasted to the max for (LA)HORDE!!
Photo: Maria Baranova
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