The circus

The circus
I attended the cirque de soleil ‘allegria’ performance on Saturday evening:
I could have done without the very French marketing balls which earnestly impels people without mouths to ‘speak’ and without legs to ‘run’ – but that aside an extraordinary and memorable show.
I liked the use of contrast: certainly some of the best gymnastic performances in the world, but the heady combination of expression, dance and song made for a dreamlike experience. The Gallic appreciation of the power of the ‘grotesque’ interested me: the beauty and grace of the performers was set against the constant accompaniment of roving fools made up to appear as disorganised, ugly and ungainly as possible. I felt that calculated effect of their disturbing presence was to heighten the perfection and beauty of the rest of the spectacle.
Also a careful admixture of fear and laughter: from high-wire acts to clowns – and hints at a postmodern deconstruction: clowning with an uneasy displacement.
Reading Solzhenitsyn’s book ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ and wondering why the hanging of Saddam Hussein is one of the most watched videos on youtube.
The common thread seems to be control: Solzhenitsyn describes the awfulness of the ‘Arrest’ – that moment when for no reason that you can understand, they come to arrest you – and of how you are suddenly plucked from the fold – of how the great ‘us and them’ divide suddenly opens and the “rabbits” look on passively as you are led away. They like to watch, just as they like to watch horror on youtube, on DVD - just as I like to watch the cirque de soleil.
We are compelled to watch those things that bring our lives into sharp contrast. There is a common pattern to our dreams: we tend to dream of those things about which we are anxious. In this way we prepare ourselves and rehearse our emotional response – in the same way we achieve some cognitive control over our environments by witnessing the misfortunes of others – at once acquainting ourselves with such extremes and reinforcing the misguided but profoundly held belief that bad things happen to other people.
And back to Solzhenitsyn – the whole first chapter of his book devoted to the dreadful catalogue of waves of mindless arrests and persecutions – millions imprisoned and put to death – and all summed up in those last few words: ‘bad things happen to other people’ – for which reason everybody stands back and observes until finally it is their turn to be observed.
And back to youtube: to hell with the story – forget stories: there is no story in sight, just emotion, emotion, emotion: an emotional outburst, a sickening event, a comic scene. No need for a story (which now looks like an increasingly tired device for tying together disparate emotionally charged content at best) - the story is now subservient to the dramatic. I wonder if this reflects a shift in our experiential narrative – i.e. in the days before technology experiences followed each other in a regular fashion dictated by real world constraints. In the informational world almost any experience can follow on from any other, in a way which subverts the traditional storyline. A circus, then.