Dance Review: BULLYACHE’s ‘Who Hurt You?’ ~ a ballad of emotional poverty
Photo by Dan John Lloyd
BULLYACHE’s evening of emotional ballads, expressed through a medley of dance mediums, knows its audience.
When drag artist Barbs walks onto a reductive nightclub version of the Queen Elizabeth Hall’s stage to play piano with melodrama, the packed house is won over by her tragic, attention-seeking charm. In Barbs, we have a hostess with the maximalist mostest – ‘plastic’ fur coat, messy handbag contents, dancing minions that soothe her painful insecurities in the way an assistant in The Real Housewives might.
The evening continues to introduce well established pop scenarios – Courtney Deyn breaks into ballads of lost love that sweat out from beneath macabre, Cabaret-style make-up, while Frank Yang and Sam Dilkes flank in sequined bikini strips, busting moves. There is a cutting vignette in which Courtney sits in the audience like a director, casually destroying Sam’s confidence with all the narcissism of a dance industry vampire.
The piece really lifts from the proverbial page during a contemporary style duet that sees two of the dance menage’ rock and slide to the score from Schindler’s List. It’s a beautifully choreographed collection of moments, in which music is deployed bravely to drive a point home – these characters, painted in broad strokes are brutalising each other in their mercenary approach to love.
Equally savage is the sequence in which Barbs uses one of her subordinates in a way that quite literally chokes them up, on the floor, in microphone wire. While these highly physical personas do have voices – primal screaming is touchstone of the show – this is a milieux that contrives and manipulates through their bodies.
Cleverly, the power-play of Who Hurt You? is based in a casual reality – off the cuff statements, defeated reactions…the familiar humour of ‘I can/you can’t.’ A high-jinx sequence in which Courtney is held at gun-point pops-out of the general malaise, as projected on-screen, with unbearable tension. This is one example of where Who Hurt You? plays on the durational and surreal conventions of Live Art to engage the audience with shock and discomfort.
Between concert strobing and the lunging sequins of Frank and Sam, some tender moments linger after the show. Although Who Hurt You? draws on the tragic Kenneth Macmillan ballet The History of Manon, it doesn’t present a world of wealth and poverty co-existing, so much as a ballad of emotional poverty and the brutality of queer love, through a masculine lens.
You don’t need a grasp of the show’s intertextuality to appreciate this evening’s charm and variety. Who Hurt You?‘s grasp of tropes makes it a crowd-pleaser for the LGBTQAI community and beyond. Although its eclectic and sprawling nature does mean that some moments are more forgettable than others.
TF
