In London I’ve been to many performances (music, dance, theatre, musicals, standup, magician, Ukulele extravaganza, etc.). See, for example, another blog post where I talked of Festival of the Spoken Nerd, one of my favourite ones.
I thought that I would enjoy anything. I’m not picky: I’ve been to improvised comedy and Shakespeare (once in Polish) and I had good times (more or less) with all of them. Sometimes better, sometimes not so good. Actually I’m easily pleased and easily surprised!
Well, I thought that I wouldn’t dislike or hate to be in a performance until last week’s Olivier Dubois Company – Tragedie. During that performance I reached new levels of boredom. So bored that I didn’t know that was possible to be this bored, I’ve never felt like it before. Even when I got stuck in the underground for 2 hours it wasn’t as boring!
At the end of each and every performance that I’ve been to I’ve always applauded… until Tragedie (what a tragedy!). I’ve always put my hands together and clapped. Not this time (even though I was tempted to applaud that finally “it’s finished!”).
The performance (dance?) consisted in 40 minutes of naked people walking on the stage in a stylish way, with a rhythmic sound (at some point I seriously thought that they had an audio problem, as it sounded very bad). I could hear some people around me sighing.
After 40 minutes of walking and bumping into eachother, I thought that, for the first time in my life, They started doing a few other movements, “dances”, etc. but sadly by that time I was out of my mind… I was trying to focus on the performance and trying to like it (I wish that I could have forced myself to like it!) but my mind was on “what I could have done this evening”, “the money that I’ve spent could have helped to…” (Free Software Foundation? Wikipedia?) and “It would be so good to be at home now relaxing”.
They didn’t have an interval. My theory at that moment was that if they had, many people would have left and not come back. Like me. As it was, some people left any way.
Then they finished. Alleluia! And what amused me, actually what amused most of whole evening: people applauded, they even cheered! People liked it!! (I think, unless they were too polite to not applaud?).
When I arrived home I looked on the Internet: it’s quite a famous performance, it has been on the stage for quite a long time. Interestingly the few reviews that I read were positive.
Really, I didn’t know that I could dislike something so much. It’s even famous and quite popular.
In my opinion the videos on the Internet look slightly better than having to witness the whole performance. But it’s one thing to watch a 2 minute video with lots of varied images from different points of view and quite another to endure the whole performance.
Anyway, I suppose it was good for the people who enjoyed it
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