Dance
Camp squib
Giannandrea Poem
Aevery Queen fan knows or should know, Freddie Mercury liked ballet. He even appeared in a memorable video-clip dressed up and moving like Vaslav Nijinsky in L'Apres-midi d'un Faune. Whether, how- ever, Jorge Donn — Maurice Mart's male muse and star of the now defunct Ballet du XXe Siècle — was into rock music is diffi- cult to say. What is certain is that both men died of Aids at the same age, and that they were in some ways artistically similar. Hence the idea of the in memoriam chore- ographic work seen last week at Sadler's Wells.
Created in 1997, Mart's Ballet for Life is yet another 'Aids ballet', but it has neither the refined melancholic lyricism nor the hard edge of any of the successful Aids- related dance works performed since the early days of the new plague. Bejart's cre- ation is camp, theatrically meretricious and relies unashamedly on the tear-jerker mechanism of the soap-opera culture. On the night I went some members of the audience found it difficult not to fall into the craftily orchestrated emotional traps that punctuate this multi-media and cross- cultural hotchpotch, and did their best to fight back the occasional tear. I too have lost dear friends and colleagues to Aids, but I found the entire thing more irritating than moving, and left the theatre resenting such a gratuitously spectacular exploitation of painfully serious themes.
Structurally, the work is a disjointed and nonsensical series of all-singing and all- dancing numbers that in theory — and very much in theory — should illustrate particu- lar moments or events in the life of the two commemorated stars. It is a pity that the overall impression is that of a second-rate music-hall variety show packed with all the most predictable tricks a choreographer could come up with. Anything goes, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Corpses on surgical beds are rolled in by two nurses before they engage in a tiresome duet set to one of Mozart's most choreographically abused piano concertos. Male dancers in bathing trunks get one by one into what might be a representation of a gay sauna or bath, namely a white box with a missing wall, and start moving together as a bunch of frenzied creepy-crawlies. Later on, the dancers form a pyramid of corpses inside the box, as if to warn the 'innocent' viewer of the dangers of gay clubbing.
Throughout the action, a mysterious man in black appears and disappears, interacts with the rest of the cast, pulls all sorts of funny faces and throws all sorts of cheeky and cheesy glances to the audience, as if having a whale of time being surrounded by death and illness. Next to him, an unbe lievably camp young fellow engages in a series of Saturday-night karaoke-like impersonations of Mercury. Meanwhile, winged angels and demons as well as two brides, one in white and one in black, wan- der round the stage pretending to be metaphorical characters. And, as if that were not enough, towards the end of the dance the audience are treated to a movie of Jorge Donn, set to the ever-so-catchy song 'I Wanna Break Free'. There are also the eye-catching costumes designed by Gianni Versace a few months before he was murdered. The sexy see-through num- bers worn by some male dancers made me think immediately of Giorgio Armani's recent revelations about what Versace thought of the people who wore his clothes. Indeed, I have seldom seen any- thing so slutty in a ballet.
The flashy quality of all these ingredi- ents, however, does not make up for the feeble content and the stale formulaic con- struction of the work. Not unlike the Elton- Berg piece reviewed last week, Ballet for Life is a dreary and unimpressive com- pendium of Bejart's now Jurassic formulae. On the night of its London premiere, how- ever, Ballet for Life was given a standing ovation. Still, I am not sure whether these enthusiasts were applauding the ballet, or the choreographer who, in a final histrionic turn, moved gracefully towards the audi- ence with Brian May and Roger Taylor of Queen on either side.
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