Everybody kept telling me to go and see Philippe Genty. Why? Doom kissed me as I entered the auditorium. Acres of white nylon billowing on stage. Perennial cliche. Signal of creative infertility. The dancers were talented enough, acrobatic and watchable – for a certain amount of time. But the five set pieces went on far too long, including another ten-minute sequence of theatrically useless nylon waving. A chimpanzee in women’s clothes presided over all. Heavily symbolic of something or other. No point in looking for story, reasons or any kind of development. Genty was sharing his imagination with us. The arrogance! It cost me £15.
This is performance art of a particularly vacuous kind. Jan Fabre is bolder and arouses the emotions, Sankai Juku have a mesmeric intensity. Genty has none of these. Unless you count mind-crippling boredom. But he does have four pages of explanation in the programme. However, a certain section of the audience seemed to somehow identify closely with its insubstantial pretentiousness.