Metabolism
Q.U.I.C.H.E.
While the guests are still sitting happily in the living room, my mum likes to tidy up in the kitchen. This doesn't explicitly mean that the invitees should leave, but if they do, it's certainly not unwelcome. All good things come to an end. Only the sausage has two.
Similarly, at the moment that probably signalled the end of his new piece ‘The Ends of Things : The Things of Ends’, Fabrice Mazliah had the stagehands roll up the splendidly glittering silver floor of the Schauspielhaus stage while the dancers were still moving across it in closed formation, armed with large images. Everything comes to an end. But not only the sausage has more than one end. This new piece, which is a ‘co-operative research by the dancers on the theme of transition’, ends almost permanently. In fact, that is the only constant: the end.
When the heroic opening image with the golden flag is finally broken up with a shot of construction site noise, the curtain falls for the first time. Cockblocked before it was really allowed to begin, the piece then explodes into an orgy of quotations lasting just under an hour.The incredibly good-looking and perfectly dressed dancers storm the stage and attack each other while everything moves around them.End of the act. Departure of the neighbour.New background, different clouds, same melancholy.Even the vanitas still life, expanded to gigantic proportions, which towers over everything as the last of the endless stage sets, has to fall at the end (i.e. at the end-end).
We are caught up in an endless flood of impressions and quotations. Where the parallel streams of our social media feeds must intersect. The end is not only permanently present, it is also eagerly desired. An end at last. A longing for death, doomsday hopes. Peace in the box at last. To quote Slavoj Žižek once again: ‘We are all just perverts, horny for the apocalypse.’ Mazliah's excessively long ending provides us with a kind of danced wank template for all our doomsday fantasies, in which we are once again allowed to become part of inorganic life. But the ending here strictly follows Kylie Minogue's country credo: ‘When I go out, I wanna go out dancing.’
TL