(LA)HORDE’s Flash Mob Revolution – The Theatre Times

The enthusiastic applause and standing ovations received by Room with a View from the large audience filling the spacious proscenium hall of the ROHM Theatre in Kyoto paid tribute to the artistry that went into the creation of this impressive seventy-minute long dance-theatre performance. Beyond the captivating music and vigorous dancing, however, Room with a View gazes over the desert of today’s political imagination.

The choreography and direction signed by the trio that goes by the name of (LA)HORDE (composed of Marine Bruti, Jonathan Debrouwer, and Arthur Harel) ensured no dull moment in a story delivered non-verbally about how alienated youth band together to voice a resistance (to what remains a mystery). Their first collaboration with the dancers from the Ballet national de Marseille, for which the trio has served as co-artistic directors since 2019, Room with a View was conceived in 2020 and brought to the Kyoto Experiment Festival 2024 for its Japanese premiere. Credited also as co-originator of the artistic concept, the French electronic music producer and artist Erwan Castex, better known under the stage name Rone, not only composed a sweeping, cinematic musical score that spectacularized the action, but also mixed the music live onstage, doubling in the fictional role of a DJ playing in the clubs frequented by the characters. The epic music paired with Julien Peissel’s monumental stage design, where huge blocks of concrete-looking material dominated the upstage at an angle, piled to create almost two-meter-high steps leading to a room-like space (at the top of the show standing in for a club). The room-like space had a view over the rest of an empty stage where the performers gradually unleashed themselves together. The structure gave multiple levels for the dancers to play with (including a rooftop level, partly obscured, found suitable for showing violent acts) in a production obviously concerned with continuously switching gears to maintain the audience’s attention.

Rone and performers in (LA)HORDE × Rone with the Ballet national de Marseille’s Room with a View, 2024.
Photo by Ryo Yoshimi. Courtesy of Kyoto Experiment.

In aesthetic, as well as content, Room with a View is uber-focused on youth culture, including the new regimes of short attention spans fostered by social media entertainment. As such, the production is packed with fun references, allusions, and quotations from TikTok dances, viral videos, and other pieces of internet debris. It operates incessantly with scene changes, mood changes, rhythm shifts, surprise effects, impressive-looking props, and trades in the grand, click-bait themes of sex, violence, and revolution. (LA)HORDE proposes the concept of “post-internet dance,” a term that can be confusing. The expression signals an interest in exploring how the internet impacts contemporary dance, not a desire to imagine what dance would be post, or after, our current internet and social media practices come to an end. The nineteen dancers, dressed in hip costumes (designed by Salomé Poloudenny) that mix hoodies and tank tops with a Mad Max edginess of ripped, torn, mismatched garments, deliver such high-energy pumping, stomping, twerking that by the halfway point of the show, the rivers of glistening sweat can be olfactorily detected from the front rows of the house. All in all, Room with a View is unbearably cool. Its idea of revolution is so superficial and self-centered, that at times during the performance I wondered if perhaps it’s being ironic. But the program notes (and all the promotional material I found online) communicate in full earnestness how the show is “a hymn to liberation.”

On the website of Dance Reflections, a generous funding and support program patronized by the French luxury jewelry brand Van Cleef & Arpels that supports a selected number of dance artists, the blurb for Room with a View states the intent to explore protest and rebellion through dance. It also stresses, from the first sentence, that the (initial) collective of twenty-five dancers number sixteen different nationalities. On stage, however, as a product of the same internet culture and the imperialism of neoliberal globalization ruled by powerful giant corporations in tech, oil, finance, fashion, entertainment, pharma, or weapons manufacture, these dancers perform middle-class characters uniformized in looks and homogenized in lifestyles and desires. They all dance in the same way to the same music and idolize the same DJ. They chase the same thrills of hooking up. In the first parts of the show, they woo each other in mating rituals involving couples or threesomes. Their sex and gender fluidity and open-mindedness to experimentation promise a potential to refashion aspects of the social world, if only they could be brought to think beyond the private sphere of immediate satisfaction. A major deterrent to do so suggested by the production is the desolate state of the surroundings. The grey, concrete scenography channels an urban space fallen into decay. At times, dust and particles fall from above, implying both crumbling buildings and pollution. At one point, dozens of fish suddenly drop from the sky, their bodies still excruciatingly flapping as they are being swept away by people in hazmat suits. I had to be reassured repeatedly by a colleague that the fish weren’t real, that they were these flapping contraptions popular on TikTok. In the context of this world, the characters’ hot yearnings for connection underneath a cool hookup culture get tainted by fear and alienation and catch fire into burning, brutal violent acts. Partners abuse and mistreat each other, culminating in a rooftop scene of horrid anal fisting and head smashing against a rock.

(LA)HORDE × Rone with the Ballet national de Marseille, Room with a View,, 2024.
Photo by Ryo Yoshimi. Courtesy of Kyoto Experiment.

And yet, somehow, the performers gradually start coalescing in the open space of the stage and begin dancing together. There are a lot of lifting and supporting and synchronized steps to suggest that they begin forming a collective. I just don’t understand how dancing in unison is supposed to signify liberation. The only pseudo-political gesture appearing in the show, repeatedly and proudly, is an infantile showing of the middle finger: to the audience, to an invisible “man” above, to everything sensed to be unjust while lacking the capacity to articulate it. The glorification of this abstract rebellion by the cool kids, this giving the finger to mom and dad, betrays their navel-gazing and privilege amidst a world of expropriation, exploitation, extinction, and genocide. Maybe, for example, if (LA)HORDE really wanted to criticize environmental degradation and global warming, they wouldn’t have gone for such a resource-guzzling, monumental scenography used only in the first part of the show.

Without a stand to suggest liberation from what and freedom to do what, Room with a View deludes itself that merely taking to the streets together to perform flash mobs or hazy protests of discontent amounts to a revolution. I suspect the show wants to criticize individualism, consumerism, and competitiveness, and to call for a move from the individual to the collective. But the production seems oblivious to how the homogenized characters do not gain distinct personas, to how individualism and individuality are two separate things, even diametrically opposed, and to how the latter gets wiped out by consumer culture. People without a consciousness of self and others do not band together to form autonomous collectives, but inflamed crowds, mobs, and hordes waiting for leaders to tell them what to do. I may be missing something crucial from (LA)HORDE’s ethos, but I find it perilous to equate collective action with synchronized, choreographed movements. After all, no one performs that better than the military.

This text was drafted by the author during the “Critics in Residence @Kyoto Experiment 2024” program organized by the Delegation of the European Union to Japan and funded by the European Union.