The Grotesqueness of Glamour, the Glamour of the Grotesque

Red Carpet

Paris Opera Ballet

Berkeley, California

Reviewed by Christopher Bernard

Cal Performances brought the legendary Paris Opera Ballet to University of California, Berkeley’s Zellerbach Theater over a sunny weekend this October to give the North American premiere of Hofesh Shechter’s new dance, Red Carpet.

The historic company, one of the world’s most celebrated (and the subject, some years ago, of a remarkable documentary by the almost equally legendary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman), traveled from its home at the Beaux Arts Palais Garnier to the modern concrete Zellerbach in a work that combines, mocks, plays with, celebrates, satirizes, and at moments transcends, the poles of an aesthetic whose tension keeps the arts alive: as Schecter says in the program notes, “between glamour and the grotesque.”

Red Carpet is a frieze of a little over a dozen vignettes complexly choreographed on a polymorphous, dimly lit space in a crowd of cohering and crashing styles. We begin in a timeless ballroom dominated by a magnificent chandelier lit by a blaze of artificial candles (a handful sometimes broken and unlit, in vulnerability and decay), beneath which—as it periodically descends to the floor, in full glory, or goes dark, withdrawing into its own ghostly shadow—more than a dozen dancers in a motley array of outfits, from an eye-catching core—a woman in a superbly glittering, blood-red ballgown and others sheathed in glitter-shouldered white—to weaving epicycles of strutters in the post-punk gear of an underground dance club, writhe and strut and wind and defy, as on any modern red carpet surrounded by an audience of obsessed fans, cynical press, and professional gawkers, to the grinding beat of a four-musician band hitting above its weight and whose pounding is layered, when the band falls silent, with the fluting whoosh of an electronically generated sound of perpetual wind.

There’s indeed as much grandeur here as glamour, and an always fascinating grotesqueness (as someone once put it, ugliness is its own aesthetic category, a kind of small change of the sublime).

Each section pits multiple styles against each other—from strained classical elegance to muscular modern, from the industrial synced in brutal competition to violent pop at the edge of disillusion and fury—in little troops of the mass dominating the piece.

There were only two extended solos, brilliant takes on a wild male chaos driven crazy in the dance of modern life, by Takeru Coste and a mohawked Loup Marcault-Deroud, in the performance I saw. And three quarters the way through, a quintet in sudden white dances against an ox-blood red curtain, suggesting the naked human form beneath the jungle of self-representative fashion hitherto on display, on stage as in human life.

Curiously, the representation of nakedness is often used to represent a kind of authenticity and purity that clothing supposedly hides. Yet here it had the opposite effect for this viewer: it is precisely clothing, makeup, style—the marks of individual choice and taste—that express the individual more directly than the body alone can ever do; the body merely bare, like the skeleton, is anonymous, a ghost, almost a nothing. It seems, if anything, less truthful, less communicative, than the elaborations of personal design. Nakedness, like sexuality, has the paradoxical effect of destroying the individual.

Red Carpet is an exhilarating experience, with many stunning moments and memorable gestures—a hammering of fist on fist in a forest of ecstatic writhing, a disco mass pointing skyward, an old-school butter-churn at one moment, at another an indrawn intensity apparently unaware and uncaring of being seen. Above all the deliberate density of movement, the obscurity and obscuring, of each dancer’s actions, like a fugue so densely worked out you can’t possibly follow any individual voice, or like the rituals of certain religions that are seen by parishioners behind a screen so their exact character is never certain, only their importance to the parishioners’ salvation.

And yet I came away with the frustrating sense it could have been even better than it was. It is such a fine piece, brilliantly danced by the company, yet it missed that perfect sense of rightness that the greatest dances, even those expressly aiming to express chaos, can provide.

Too much of the inventiveness in the piece is front-loaded, giving it little space to grow into later. In the final third, there was a feeling of exhausted inspiration, of repetitiveness, even of silliness (the quintet aforementioned quickly devolves into a series of pantomimes that, for this viewer, were both too obvious and too disconnected from the rest of the piece). And the ending of the piece was strangely unsatisfying; the world may or may not end in a whimper, but this dance, alas, does.

Nevertheless, what I remember most vividly is the grand ball of a crowd endlessly diverse in style, approach, movement, and form that, seemingly despite itself, combined in a strange rightness that was as moving as it was exciting: like a great abstract painting in motion, at those moments (and there were many) everything fell into place. Or like a living, moving forest that Shechter himself evokes: “[Choreographing a dance] is like being in a forest. . . . I continue to explore. I haven’t left the forest.”

Red Carpet was created by the Paris Opera Ballet’s multi-talented Shechter along more dimensions than usual: he also designed the atmospheric set and wrote the unrelenting music, which was performed by Yaron Engler (who also collaborated on the music) on drums, Olivier Koundouno on cello, Marguerite Cox on double bass, and Brice Perda on an array of wind instruments. The moody lighting was by Tom Viser. It frustrated some members of the audience, as they loudly proclaimed in the lobby afterward—but not this one: straining to see what was going on, as suggested above, seemed part of the point, though the point was sometimes over-drawn. But I’m a bit of a sucker for ghostly effects, so I have few complaints.

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Christopher Bernard is the author of The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, which won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.