‘Disco Elysium’ | Experience the World of Radical Cabaret Up Close and Personal

This year Selah Dance Collective will kick off the Santa Barbara summer dance season with a not-to-be-missed immersive dance-theater event, Disco Elysium, May 29-30 at L’image Gallery in the Funk Zone. As described on the website, Disco Elysium is a new work, choreographed by Meredith Ventura, “inspired by early 20th-century cabaret, grotesque performance, and the charged worlds of nightlife where art and resistance collide.”

Sounds intriguing …

Disco Elysium is the culmination of Ventura’s multiple years of research in dance, history, and performance studies. Her work, as she describes it, is influenced by medieval Spanish tragicomedy, the Radical Cabaret movement of pre-World-War-II Europe, and the innovative 20^th Century German choreographer Pina Bausch. 

Radical Cabaret was an underground movement which started in the Weimar Republic, “a global performance form that shattered the boundaries between theater, dance, and popular spectacle,” as Ventura describes in her photography exhibit Slide on the Razor, on display at UCSB.  Radical Cabaret challenged social norms, embracing and performing queerness, combining visual and performing arts to create an immersive experience. As Ventura described in her exhibit, “Viennese cabaret defied dominant narratives of modernism and forged a radical aesthetic of dissent.”

“Disco Elysium conjures a world at once decadent and decayed. The dancers inhabit a liminal space — half dance hall, half ruin — where grotesque bodies flicker between ecstasy and exhaustion, collapse and resurrection,” states the website.

While many choreographers come to their work with the intent to tell stories, Ventura approaches her work with the intent to pose questions. She asks, “What does it mean to make the body a stage for radical play, a site of refusal, beauty, and excess?”

Let’s enter the space and find out.

Disco Elysium will take a different approach to theater from proscenium stage productions, as Ventura explained, “more up-close-and-personal than a theater setting.” There will be cocktail tables around a three-quarter thrust stage that extends into the audience, giving a true cabaret feeling. “In a true cabaret performance, the audience can see itself; the audience experiences the show and itself,” said Ventura.

What an interesting concept: the self-aware audience. Cabaret, as Ventura explained, is a tool for rebellion. 

Disco Elysium will include highlights from Ventura’s signature works, Sound and Smoke and Palermo!  Ripe with humor, sarcasm, and social commentary, expressed through a contrasting array of musical choices, Ventura questions the meaning of love, beauty, and what it means to be human.

For example, a section from a Bach Cantata is followed by the Andrews Sisters’s version of a 1930s tune from Yiddish theater, “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.” The pathetic  “Bésame Mucho” (“Kiss me a lot, because this night might be our last, and I fear I will lose you afterwards”) is followed by the pseudo tongue-in-cheek, Big Band sound of “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” which is followed by somber baroque music of Henry Purcell. 

Such contrasting musical topography! Through old favorites that will make you want to get up and dance, and radical new tunes, Ventura’s soundscape will make you pay attention.

The titles that Ventura chooses for her works are always interwoven with layers of meaning. Sound and Smoke is a reference to a line from Goethe’s Faust: “Names are just sound and smoke,” but also a reference to a Weimar-era cabaret group Schall und Rausch, meaning (of course) Sound and Smoke.   Palermo!  is a reference to Pina Bausch’s 1989 work Palermo Palermo, a radical, innovative work which Bausch developed after visiting Palermo, Sicily. But Palermo! is also a reference to St. Rosalia, the patron saint of Palermo, whose bones were scattered to rid the city of the plague in 1625.  Ghastly!

So how can we understand the title Disco Elysium?

Disco, referring to the 1970’s genre of dance music characterized by a heavy drumbeat, also means “I learn,” in its literal translation from the Latin verb “discere,” meaning “to learn.”

Elysium refers to the utopian afterlife in Greek mythology where only the righteous or heroic are admitted. But wait — there is also a dark allusion: Elysium was a dystopian science fiction film in which the heavily polluted Earth is dying and its population starving, while an orbiting spaceship named Elysium is inhabited by people rich enough to gain entry.

Wow.  Unpack this conundrum of references…or don’t. In either case, the audience, can expect a fascinating, retro-facing-futuristic immersive experience, with a complex score, full of wit and sarcasm and Ventura’s style of gravity-defying lifts – “…an immersive choreography of survival and desire: the dance of bodies refusing disappearance, shimmering defiantly against the inevitable” (Selah website).

And who can pull off such a performance? The powerful, dramatic dancers of Selah, with the superlative,  versatile artists Brenna Chumaceo and Hayley Maynard, also of State Street Ballet, and the amazing Arianna Hartanov, formerly of Selah and SSB, now dancing in Germany, who will be returning especially for this event.  Also joining the cast will be some of the dancers of Novus and some new recruits.

Well? What are you waiting for? This show is sure to sell out!

See Disco Elysium on Friday, May 29 at 7 p.m. and Saturday, May 30 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. at L’image Gallery in the Funk Zone, 100 E Yanonali St., selah.dance/disco. The Saturday evening show will be followed by a dance party with a surprise DJ.