It’s silly season again in the arts with a slew of awards shows handing out gongs to the same people they always hand them out to. We’ve written about this before, and we’re getting tired of it!!
The latest calamity is the South Bank Show Awards which, in a fit of peek, has given Wayne McGregor, you just knew it had to be him, not one but two awards.
‘Infra’, created for the Royal Ballet and ‘Entity’, created for reasons past understanding, walked off with the honours. We managed to catch ‘Infra’ on the Intertubes because the BBC, ever keen to touch the forelock, did a gushing documentary followed by a live broadcast from the ROH in London not too long ago.
Getting to the end proved difficult because the work is, in a word, boring. It’s tedium in a smock. Some, lesser cultured types, might take a brief look at ‘Infra’ and proclaim, in text speak, WTF?
The show uses graphics that make a ZX Spectrum look sophisticated (Horace Goes Skiing rocks, Ed!), music that should never have been written and costumes that are designed to appeal to the lecherous old men and women that make up the majority of the Royal Opera House audience. (the girls are in shorts and the men are topless, well some of them).
It’s pathetic!
We know, here in TheLab™, that it’s all about taste and what not but these awards have got nothing to do with taste and even less to do with art, they are about geography. These awards are handed out by people who are too lazy to get their pampered backsides outside the magnetic pull of the M25. They never see anything else, ever!
The only way they will see your show is if your tour takes you to within about 25 miles of their front door. Even if you do make it inside the ring of concrete and steel you must, and this is important, have done at least 15 media interviews where you talk about your work in such an excruciatingly pretentious manner it induces vomiting in anybody with a conscience.
Mr McGregor is the safe choice because they are guaranteed to have seen something he’s done, he’s not dead and he creates work for dancers that wear shorts or perform topless. Nuff said!
Sarcasm aside it’s has been years since any award has actually meant anything. It’s all either fixed, predictable or just plain old boring.
Throughout the last year we have traveled more than 13,000 kilometers up and down the country watching work of all kinds from a multitude of dance makers and the very idea that ‘Infra’ (we never saw ‘Entity’) was the best, most entertaining piece of creative work in the wacky world of dance is so funny we might actually go insane laughing about it.
We feel a confrontation with Batman coming on, does anybody have any white face make-up and some lipstick?