(LA)HORDE with the Ballet National de Marseille: Age of Content review

“Terrifying and exhilarating”

Sadler's Wells East, London

A scene from (LA)HORDE with the Ballet National de Marseille's Age of Content at Sadler's Wells East, London. Photo: Gaëlle Astier-Perret

Tour de force from the French company confronts how our lives are being shaped by online worlds

(LA)HORDE is the name adopted by the trippy dance-making trio Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer and Arthur Harel, who have held the reins at Ballet National de Marseille since 2019. We had a taste of their no-holds-barred approach to choreography last year at the Southbank Centre, and now, as part of the Dance Reflections festival, they bring their full-length work Age of Content to London, and what a ride it is.

The internet age’s blurring of the real and the virtual is the subject of the piece, which hurtles us into the worlds of gaming, pornography and social media to consider how our emotions and desires are being reshaped. First, a fight: a figure on a metal walkway holds the controls of a full-sized car skeleton, which emerges from the back curtain in clouds of smoke à la Back to the Future. A dancer in a hoodie and tracksuit bottoms, pigtails peeking out from the hood and face obscured by a diaphanous mask, embarks on a Ballardian duet with this vehicle, which bucks and tilts on its hydraulics as her interactions become increasingly lascivious.

A clone is spat out from under the curtain and they tussle for dominance of the car; then a small army of identically dressed figures begins a full-on brawl to claim it. It’s a battle of influencers, each determined to commandeer the top spot and capture the ultimate selfie for Instagram, sprawled across the object of their desire.

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If that seemed like a glitching version of Grand Theft Auto, we’re properly into online gaming with the next section. The blank-faced dancers adopt an uncanny mimicry of nostalgically old-school avatar movements – jaunty heel-first walks, running on the spot, slow bobbing in place and robotic gestures. They get caught in frustrating loops, walking into walls, throwing punches, then merging, moving with purpose for a nebulous goal. It’s mesmeric.

A couple solemnly lip-syncs the spoken lyrics to Forever Young before things take a darker turn. We’re in the realm of online porn and OnlyFans, where violence stands in for tenderness, and frenetic humping and pumping is engaged in with no obvious joy. It seems to be a reworking of the short piece Weather Is Sweet, seen last year. Individuals swap out of couples and trios – those taking part are disposable and only the spectacle is important. The cumulative effect is chilling.

One last switch – to the world of TikTok dance crazes, here imagined on a grand Fosse-musical-style scale as all the cast takes on the rictus “living my best life” grins of social-media reels everywhere and regurgitate viral routines, often on repeat, Movements from the previous section reappear as they twirl and twerk – the internet eating itself as everything is absorbed into one bland wall of “content”. Beneath the surface veneer of euphoria, then, buoyed by sweeping, uplifting Philip Glass music, there’s a klaxon of calamity about where this virtual reality is taking us, delivered with a marvellous Gallic shrug. It’s a terrifying and exhilarating doom-scroll of a show.

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