mk-ultra dance review

This is copied from something I wrote elsewhere. I'll come back and tweak it, add links etc. later.

I chose the wrong place to try and escape election horror. Choreographer Rosie Kay's multimedia dance collaboration with Adam Curtis, MK-ULTRA.

Sadly that doesn't mean Adam Curtis was dancing; happily it does mean that part of the show was a triangular screen showing effectively a mini-documentary from him, exploring Discordianism and conspiracy theories, particularly about the Illuminati. And Walt Disney.

That aspect of the show provided the bulk of the visuals that weren't the dancers, and provided the soundtrack - which was mainly music. As a documentary it was necessarily slight, and curiously felt even more tendentious than his tv/online works do (this isn't a criticism, btw).

The choreography and actual dancing were really impressive, and pretty clever. Overall I really enjoyed the show. The difficulty I had with it was that it wasn't clear how the Adam Curtis bits were supposed to intersect with the dance bits.

There was some use of/reference to dance as physical/sexual exhibition and personal expression; to dance as seen in contemporary music videos (especially by the likes of Beyonce, about whom 'OMG: Illuminati!' style conspiracy videos are rife); to cliches of dance (jazz hands); historic dance as transmitted through movies like West Side Story; as well as dance as an impressive physical feat, and an historically-rooted and sophisticated modern art-form. Some of that seemed to be about how we as individuals locate ourselves in a confusing world, express our identities, and how we relate to each other and to structures of power.

However, most of that is retrospective analysis. The bits of it that became obvious really only did so in the second half of the show, and particularly during the final few minutes of dance to When You Wish Upon A Star.