It was about time a dance-maker exacted revenge on dance academics. In Alexander Ekman’s 2010 Cacti, a voiceover explains the alleged semantics of the choreography by resorting to theoretical clichés and the known modes of that mental self-pleasuring that many academics indulge in. As the vacuously pompous words bear little or no relation to the quirky actions, the contrast between the taped voice and the dancing becomes explosively comic. Later on, recorded voices are also used to let viewers peep into the minds of two dancers performing a duet, humorously highlighting the kind of artistically detached thinking performers frequently engage in while dancing.
As stated by the voiceover in the first half of the work, this is all very postmodern, but it is postmodernism that ridicules postmodernism in a way that is cleverly refined and never predictable. As someone who has been working in dance academia for the past 15 years, I almost choked with laughter.
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