A show that claimed to cross Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 ballet Manon with Paul Verhoeven’s cult film Showgirls had to be seen, two stories of women leveraging their physical allure as they only currency they’ve got. Bullyache’s Who Hurt You? is not as neat a concept as that description, it’s as messy as a lost weekend, but boldly self-assured, and the idea of performing for your survival is among those spewed out into its world of glitter and sweat.
This is only the second piece made by arts collective Bullyache, led by Jacob Samuel and Courtney Deyn. Based around their own songs, the work is like a live music video crossed with the avant-garde dance theatre of someone like Les Ballets C de la B, but utterly steeped in young queer British culture.
Who Hurt You? revolves around the character of a washed-up drag queen (played by London “drag slag” and classical pianist Barbs) who delivers an epic Whitney Houston lip sync and veers increasingly close to breakdown. Deyn and Oscar Jinghu Li are her backing dancers, dressed in baggy grey tracksuits with black thongs and sequinned bras over the top, launching into intensely performative Latin dance, and sexy/sinister video babe moves with pulsating, pulverising pelvises and eyes boring into the audience. Magnus Westwell plays live violin.
The mood swings between coldness and connection, brutality and humour. In the 1940s, the great dance critic Edwin Denby spoke of the simplest purpose of a review: did an event of artistic interest take place, and if it did, what particular flavour did it have? Well Who Hurt You? was definitely an event. This is what’s bubbling under in dance’s dark underbelly; it was exciting to be in the room. And the flavour? The taste of desperation, in all its senses: wretchedness, exhaustion, a desperation for attention, adulation and desire. Something Manon, and Showgirls’ Nomi Malone, might recognise.
