Naked dancers jumping on the audience? This sort of trashing of manners is an assault on our values
By QUENTIN LETTS
Last updated at 1:40 AM on 7th June 2011
Luke Jennings, dance critic of The Observer, should sue Sadler’s Wells theatre for assault. Last week he was watching an avant-garde show called Un Peu De Tendresse Bordel De Merde. Naked male dancers ran into the stalls, rubbed their crotches in people’s faces, parted their buttocks within inches of women’s noses and generally behaved like apes.
There is a line between artistic shock and shocking art. The thuggishly nude show at Sadler’s Wells proceeded to cross it. One of the dancers, spotting Mr Jennings, tried to steal his pen and notepad. Mr Jennings gripped tight to them.
Arsing about: Dave St-Pierre Company at Sadler's Wells in Un peu de tendresse bordel de Merde!
The dancer, outraged that someone was declining to kowtow to all this nudist japery, retaliated by pulling off the Observer man’s glasses and spitting on them gobbily. He handed them back ‘with a sneer’ (and a slimy smear) before returning to the stage, his pleased-with-itself sausage and veg flapping around for all to see.
Groan, it’s naked-art-scandal time again. Trivial? In some ways. But not for the first time, communal respectability is being challenged by insistent, egomaniacal coarseness. That is worth our attention.
Once again a state-subsidised theatre — Sadler’s Wells receives £2.5 million of our tax money a year — is securing itself some attention by flashing the flesh.
In your face: Dave St-Pierre Company at Sadler's Wells
Recently we had masturbation, homosexual rape, male nudity and a hanging-by-testicles at the publicly funded Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith.
There was also some harmless dangling of Sir Ian McKellen’s grandfather-clock pendulum when he played King Lear at the RSC.
Only last week we had a striptease scene, male and female, in the greedily commercial production of Much Ado About Nothing which stars David Tennant.
Was Shakespeare’s loveliest romantic comedy enhanced by a muscular youth baring his smooth gluteus maximus? Not for me — the human body is not a revelation. We all have one, and most of us have seen a fair few in our time.
To the go-ahead crowd of our public theatres, however, nudity is a taboo crying out to be broken. Nudity is — gasp! — a dare.
Bum note: Some seem amused by the performance
They have in recent years tried the same thing, to laws of diminishing returns, with bad language, violence and general oafishness.
Dumb down, dirty up, crassify, despoil the bourgeois aesthetic: it is the same thinking that shortly before the Bolshevik revolution saw the Russian futurists shout the anti-traditional slogan: ‘Throw Pushkin and Tolstoy overboard from the steamship of modernity!’
Sometimes stage nudity is nothing more than ‘celebrity gets kit off’, as happened when Anna Friel briefly disrobed in Breakfast At Tiffany’s in 2009, and Daniel Radcliffe flashed his Harry Potters in Equus in 2007.
Jerry Hall slipped off her negligee in The Graduate 11 years ago. Poor old Jerry. She thought she would attract admiration on a par with that of Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room, but the moment was a dud. ‘Two fried eggs in the gloaming,’ as I wrote at the time.
The Kidman moment inspired a colleague to speak of ‘pure theatrical Viagra’, but stage nudity is often terribly unsexy.
How rude: Un peu de tendresse bordel de Merde
Greater eroticism can be obtained by a performer retaining a strand or two of clothing. Ask the poor punters at Sadler’s Wells if they were aroused by those clowns holding up their nether regions like squaddies submitting their rifle barrels for inspection by the sergeant-major.
It’s enough to put one right off one’s bag of Revels. ‘Chocolate drop, dear?’
Complaining about it just gives them more publicity, but there is a serious side to this. Anger is justified because this sort of trashing of manners represents an assault on our shared values. Only when we cease to care will the barbarians have won.
The London stage has been going this way for some time. Much of it springs from faux egalitarian self-loathing among the privileged intellectuals who run our playhouses. They agonise over the fact that the majority of their audiences are prosperous, polite, middle-class types. They try to shake them up by giving them something ‘edgy’ and ‘political’.
Stand-up routine: Naked without his wig
All this eventually does is make the theatre even less enticing to people on low incomes, who decide not to waste their precious pennies on offensive agitprop.
You can tell a lot about a society from what it holds dearest in art. What are its ideals of line, word, movement and sound? These inform you about that society’s esteem for order, its approach to love, its notions of beauty.
On this basis, 21st-century Western civilisation is in the final twitches of decadent collapse.
The Sadler’s Wells show, choreographed by Dave St-Pierre, a Canadian, had more nudity than the beaches of Mykonos. The artistic theme of Un Peu De Tendresse, apparently, is that human sexuality is less important than emotion. Sadler’s Wells’ website lets the side down, however, by spelling it ‘Un Pea de Tendresse’.
Luke Jennings was not the only critic who was unimpressed. The Independent On Sunday, watching ‘the bearded bimbos gleefully rubbing their bottoms against anything that doesn’t resist’, and a scene in which a knickerless women straddles a chocolate cake, found it an ‘often tediously barbaric show’. The Telegraph spoke of ‘a gimmicky barrage of genitals’.
For me, the nudity was of secondary concern to the violence meted out to Mr Jennings. Male dancers are often pretty scantily clad — although when they wear tights their crown jewels don’t jiggle like the Titanic’s chandeliers. While you could argue that the stage scenes of massed nudity at Sadler’s Wells had a certain artistic ambition, all that changed when the dancers crossed into the auditorium and became carried away in their aggressive fervour. This is what can happen when the disciplines of artistic comportment are smashed.
We subsidise places such as Sadler’s Wells to be citadels of art. ‘Un peu’ might have been OK on the fringe, but it was ‘de trop’ at such a prized venue.
In the round: Performers invade the audience space
I had a Luke Jennings moment last year at the hippy musical Hair! I was sitting at the end of row C in the stalls and was picked on, possibly a-purpose, by half-naked lead actor Will Swenson.
He stood on my armrests, gyrating his groin in my face. But what really irked me was the breaking of the convention that actors treat the audience as invisible. No one wants to return to the pre-1968 days when the Lord Chamberlain could censor what appeared. Nudity has its time and place on stage, although generally art is far more affecting when an actor bares himself emotionally.
But are we not, as a Big Society, entitled to ask theatres that receive taxpayers’ money to recognise the part they play in moulding public morality?
The very phrase ‘public morality’ may be one that the Left dislikes. It may be something our defamation judges want to destroy with their injunctions.
But without a code or recognised manners and, yes, morals, without discretion and respect and a sense of beauty, we might as well chuck in the whole thing and hand the keys of the Tower of London to Al Qaeda.
That is why I hope, for once, that lawyers are hired and The Observer’s dance critic takes Sadler’s Wells to court. Sue the pants off them, Luke. They like it that way.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1395061/Naked-dancers-jumping-audience-This-sort-trashing-manners-assault-values.html#ixzz1Ohwv9L9U
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