a means to an end

Over the weekend, I caught an abstract dance musical performance titled Green Snake in Buto by Lee Swee Keong that personally was very avant-gardely What-the-hell-was-that-All-about?! It was one of those modern dance experimental stuff, well actually it was not really modern for Buto was created by the Japanese back in the late 50’s. Also known as the Dance of Darkness. How pretentious can you get? Apparently very.So we had this dude with his entire body painted in white, looking very ghoulish and scary like one of those evil spirits ripped out of a B-grade Canto horror flick (it’s the Halloween weekend I guess), prancing around the stage frantically to some incorrigible music that sounded equally as mind-boggling. Risking sounding like a complete imbecilic moron, sometimes I wonder at how obscure is the thin red line between art and pretentious rubbish that tries to fake art, really is. It is like looking at a million-dollar Picasso’s masterpiece in a mid-town San Francisco art gallery and inevitably having to entertain the thought that a 5-year-old retarded kid could have painted something similar for two bucks.

And of course we had the usual pompous-ass yuppie above average-income-earning middle class audience attending this productions the same way we would find them in all artsy-futsy performances. And I know for certain that albeit sounding like one, I am not a total idiot. So if I ever wonder was going on in a show, I am pretty damn sure 90% of the attending crowd would have not an inkling of what on earth was going on too. The other 10% fell asleep after the first fifteen minutes.

So that was what happened. I paid twenty bucks to watch a dude doing cool yoga tricks and pulling off seizure-like moves like drunken mentally-unsound hobo around a gigantic abstractly-shaped phallic object planted in the middle of the set. I am just exaggerating, the show was not really that bad but I thought it was too abstract to the point that the audience would have problem interpreting the message that the dance was supposed to convey. Or perhaps, there was no message behind the dance. Maybe it was just a display of spatial manipulation that could be achieved by the creative sleek movement of our body. Yeah right.

In the end of the day, I still don’t get it. Actually I do for some part but I need “guidance” when it comes to understanding why on earth did I just pay my cold hard cash to watch an almost naked freaky-looking dude with a small package (for the record-Not that it mattered to me, I am just saying it in consideration of my friend, Anrie) mess around on stage, when I could have kept my money and look at a crazy hobo messes around for free in town on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

The buto dance was supposed to be a medium thru which the performer integrate nature, reality and life within himself. Or so the program book told me. To shed some light on why I thought the performance was perhaps a tat over-rated- So the show started out in complete darkness and the crazy dude came out holding two willow sticks and walked around the stage slow-mo for a good 15 minutes before he stopped only to mess around again doing body-contorting yoga stunts whereby he turned himself into a caterpillar, made himself looking all scary by sticking out his tongue (his whole body was painted White and eery music was playing in the background all the damn time while this whole shit was goin’ on), and then another dude came out to mess around with a drum and cymbal before the whole show ended with the first dude running in circles for another good 15 minutes, all the while making funny faces that I could not help but to feel he was mocking my intelligence because I had paid good money to watch him mess around the stage in the name of modern dance.

The best part was that everyone clapped vociferously at the end of the show. As if they understood the testy shit that had just been presented to them. Goddamn pretentious pricks. I didn’t clap at all until the musicians came in ‘cos I thought they played some pretty trippy shit. And then I clapped out of charity for the dancers. There were two of them. So 10 bucks a pop. Take money from a Student, would you?!

I do not mean no disrespect for the entire performance. I am very certain that a lot of effort, thoughts and philosophy has been poured into the production. What I do find entertaining and funny to mock is that, beyond all that- could the performance really be nothing more than a piece of shit? Or is avant garde art so subjectively profound and progressive that it allows no room for objective judgments? How would people review this? Apparently according to the program (again), the performer is a critically acclaimed award-winning fellow that could only mean that I am a dumb ass afterall who did not know how to appreciate good art. But what is good art when the meaning is lost to her audience? For a lack of better comparison and my personal fancy for vulgar sexual analogies- it is like telling a chic how great it feels to have a giant penis. Like mine, specifically. They could probably guess it would feel awesome to the point that they would love to walk around naked all the damn time, but they won’t understand the awesomeness of having a Negro dick.

Of course, my analogy makes no sense.

However bad or good the show was, the dude who choreographed the whole thing apparently believes in Zen Buddhism and the whole load of Shinto Japanese philosophical way of life trippy stuff, so that explained alot of those meaningless messin’ around to achieve inner peace stuff on stage. I would really love to know what his dance was all about and because modern dance allows room for subjective interpretations, I would like to know what he would think of my personal interpretations of his show. If I’d ever have the opportunity for a discourse with the dude, I would leave all my mockeries behind because I do have some serious thoughts of his dance.

Given a choice, would I go back? Yes and no. Yes I would go back just to make meaning of the whole shit and No, if I had to choose between watching an almost-naked dude doing a crazy dance and say, watching paint dry.