Lord of the Dance
Last night I went with Alyssa (who’s birthday it was) to see Lord of the Dance 3D at cineworld.
I have always wanted to see a riverdance show for some inexplicable reason and having seen interviews with Michael Flatley, my impression is that like, say Stallone circa Rocky 4, he was a guy who has lost his mind in terms of how far to go in big entertainment and expected the show to be a hilarious spectacle.
It began exactly how I wanted it to to with these animated flaming titles complete with tap-shoe noise cues as they emerged. There’s some background from Flatley for about ten minutes but from then on it’s pretty much a show-film.
What was interesting, and is interesting about people in this position, is that they are a datum, a measuring point of what to do and be but more importantly of what not to do and be.
Flatley’s job, that he works incredibly hard at and is incredibly good at, isn’t to make 27 people in a bar raise an eyebrow, it’s not to make 1400 people in a club be on-board with what he’s doing, his job is to find the common denominator between ten thousand people and then ten thousand more in tens of venuses across the whole world to blow their minds and make them happy. It’s really easy to bring cynicism and irony to the table when looking at work this broad, and in some ways it’s appropriate to do so but in the same way that the raw energy of a half formed musical performance overturns the professional notion of rehearsal-perfection, there’s something in looking at someone at the top of the game and thinking about how and why they think, even if it’s to crawl back to our cynical self-righteous bunkers afterwards knowing that that’s not how to do it.
The other interesting thing is that behind the notion of ‘I’m not interested in broad entertainment on a massive scale’ lurks a veiled notion of ‘I choose not to do that but I could do it and be successful if I weren’t being so fucking cool and doing smaller-scale cool shit for cool people in the cool club’.
I’m not saying we need more Michael Flatleys but I think there’s a lot to learn from him even if you don’t use it.
One of the things I was struck by, that I kept yapping at with my internal naysayers jabs, was that he is a complete perfectionist. Everything he does, the choices he makes, is to make that show immaculate. Examples:
-He has two glamorous fiddle players who trade riffs but I’m pretty sure were miming but were the original players of the pieces and were playing the music along to the recording.
- I don’t think there was any live music, the drum kit took one second to remove because it wasn’t mic-ed up
- I’m pretty sure that for the most part the clog/tap feet noises were pre-recorded and mixed into the music played on the night.
These things seem silly to me on first glance, I’d rather hear the energy of the fiddle players playing live and see a real band but with that comes risk and lack of control. A radio mic going down, some sleepy-headed soundguy forgetting to turn a mic on, mixing errors, all of the complications of a live show.
In a seamless, perfect show, where the audience is really too far away to see fiddle fingering but can see the broad shapes of those women dancing as they play, you can remove the risk of instrument/PA channel/PA engineer problems by taking a full soundtrack eq-d for arenas that works perfectly for the whole time with no chance of hitches (barring complete break down).
The fiddle players, like the dancers are incredibly well rehearsed, rehearsed enough to hit all of the musical cues perfectly, there’s no risk there and the soundtrack is HUGE. The Cinema had it pretty racked up so that the ridiculous hyper-compressed advert jingles sounded like Armageddon before it started and it was pretty much full-on throughout.
The show itself was kind of conservative at one end and hyper-surreal at the other (Rocky 4 territory), massive pyro, an army of rollerball/warriors/terminator inspired ‘baddies’ who beat him up and steal his ‘Lord of the Dance belt’ before he kicks some dance-move ass. The baddies have weird skull helmets and there’s Dan Toporowski style skull faces projected on the background.
Intermingled with this narrative was a selection of group and solo pieces which are all glamour and not really about sexuality. There’s a scene where a stage full of female dancers rip off their dresses and dance in their underwear (I think that’s where the wolf whistle appeared on the soundtrack - I imagined a soundboard with a channel labelled ‘wolf-wistle’.) and on the one hand it was a ropey idea but it was all about glamour and not about titillation as the dancework they were doing wasn’t attempting to be sexy.
It’s an interesting aspect that in it’s way, most of the show is as chaste as the ballet I saw earlier in the year. I’m always interested in the purpose of dance, as it is communication. Hybrid Irish/contemporary dancing is so steeped in tradition that all of those little movement cues that were probably incredibly hot when they were put together to represent femininity at the time and allusions to folk images like fertility, squash any notion of sexuality to a contemporary audience as it is so traditionally steeped.
Tellingly, when the solo dancers were allowed to be sultry, most of the dancing eschewed the most traditional movements. The purpose of lord of the Dance, crazy narratives aside is purely celebratory. The thing that Flatley is capturing that will appeal to ten thousand/millions of people is a joyous celebration of life enacted without too much metaphorical camouflage by incredibly skilled and hard working performers.
The point here is that this is ‘what people want’ and a lot of art is about ‘what can I do when I don’t do ‘what people want’, striving to be ‘interesting’ or ‘challenging’. When you look at ‘people’ as the bulk of people, when your audience isn’t necessarily specialised (going to 40 shows a year) you need the basic glamorous spectacles presented by performers doing things that the audience could NEVER do to impress that many people.
You have to be an actual genius to find these things and make them work without cynicism (the audience will smell that) or condescension. I think Flatley gets to go over the edge because his intentions are absolutely pure.
I also see it as a metaphor for right wing rather than left wing politics. In the same way that right wingers GET THINGS DONE because there is no internal debates or side-views or compromises. The Right wing dystopia is to see a goal and make it happen, get on board for a greater good, be part of something big and powerful. It is a dystopia but it has a lot to teach the left with it’s constant watering down and intellectual asides, democracy and ideas of fair play and the way things ‘should be’. Lord of the dance doesn’t flounder on the debate about whether the fiddle players should play live, Flatley has heard the tape, it sounds amazing and he makes the decision. He even admits, ‘a great army needs a great general and a great general needs a great army’.
Flatley is a phenomenon in itself and really the icing on the cake. The guy is in his fifties and while he’s in great shape he has spent a few years with a kind of post-viral debilitating illness. I’d liken him to a famous Spanish dancer, past their prime with an amazing past but where affection and history bring the audience to them more than half way. My guess is he used to give himself more to do but physically limits himself, costume and flash give him an edge over the other dancers as well as his place as the star but he’s a funny guy as a performer. He mixes matador-style proud masculine movements with the most merrie melodies flicks and quick movements that make me laugh like Chaplin does. I’m sure these are not meant to be funny but I think it’s another side to him and reduces a sense of arrogance. I suspect that he’s aware of how much ridicule what he does comes under from all quarters (quarters not worth £600million pounds) and tries to be gracious about it while probably being annoyed.
He’s also larger than his skin. He looks so normal but his roles are so heroic that for me, that’s where the biggest human humour lay in the show. There was a lingering bit where the jester’s penny whistle had been broken by the baddies (I know, I know) and Michael does a bit of business about not being able to fix it before producing a new one. It’s too long and he just looks like a dad acting badly in front of his kids but he’s projecting a heroic warrior in their calmer moments.
I loved it for the same reasons I love Hollywood. It takes a very special person to take the reins of a project THAT huge, inject style and content that goes over the edge enough to create a FUCKING SHOW, OK that person is likely to be a megalomaniac but maybe they need to be to have the self belief to take all of that on.
Anyway, Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance, I salute you!
I have always wanted to see a riverdance show for some inexplicable reason and having seen interviews with Michael Flatley, my impression is that like, say Stallone circa Rocky 4, he was a guy who has lost his mind in terms of how far to go in big entertainment and expected the show to be a hilarious spectacle.
It began exactly how I wanted it to to with these animated flaming titles complete with tap-shoe noise cues as they emerged. There’s some background from Flatley for about ten minutes but from then on it’s pretty much a show-film.
What was interesting, and is interesting about people in this position, is that they are a datum, a measuring point of what to do and be but more importantly of what not to do and be.
Flatley’s job, that he works incredibly hard at and is incredibly good at, isn’t to make 27 people in a bar raise an eyebrow, it’s not to make 1400 people in a club be on-board with what he’s doing, his job is to find the common denominator between ten thousand people and then ten thousand more in tens of venuses across the whole world to blow their minds and make them happy. It’s really easy to bring cynicism and irony to the table when looking at work this broad, and in some ways it’s appropriate to do so but in the same way that the raw energy of a half formed musical performance overturns the professional notion of rehearsal-perfection, there’s something in looking at someone at the top of the game and thinking about how and why they think, even if it’s to crawl back to our cynical self-righteous bunkers afterwards knowing that that’s not how to do it.
The other interesting thing is that behind the notion of ‘I’m not interested in broad entertainment on a massive scale’ lurks a veiled notion of ‘I choose not to do that but I could do it and be successful if I weren’t being so fucking cool and doing smaller-scale cool shit for cool people in the cool club’.
I’m not saying we need more Michael Flatleys but I think there’s a lot to learn from him even if you don’t use it.
One of the things I was struck by, that I kept yapping at with my internal naysayers jabs, was that he is a complete perfectionist. Everything he does, the choices he makes, is to make that show immaculate. Examples:
-He has two glamorous fiddle players who trade riffs but I’m pretty sure were miming but were the original players of the pieces and were playing the music along to the recording.
- I don’t think there was any live music, the drum kit took one second to remove because it wasn’t mic-ed up
- I’m pretty sure that for the most part the clog/tap feet noises were pre-recorded and mixed into the music played on the night.
These things seem silly to me on first glance, I’d rather hear the energy of the fiddle players playing live and see a real band but with that comes risk and lack of control. A radio mic going down, some sleepy-headed soundguy forgetting to turn a mic on, mixing errors, all of the complications of a live show.
In a seamless, perfect show, where the audience is really too far away to see fiddle fingering but can see the broad shapes of those women dancing as they play, you can remove the risk of instrument/PA channel/PA engineer problems by taking a full soundtrack eq-d for arenas that works perfectly for the whole time with no chance of hitches (barring complete break down).
The fiddle players, like the dancers are incredibly well rehearsed, rehearsed enough to hit all of the musical cues perfectly, there’s no risk there and the soundtrack is HUGE. The Cinema had it pretty racked up so that the ridiculous hyper-compressed advert jingles sounded like Armageddon before it started and it was pretty much full-on throughout.
The show itself was kind of conservative at one end and hyper-surreal at the other (Rocky 4 territory), massive pyro, an army of rollerball/warriors/terminator inspired ‘baddies’ who beat him up and steal his ‘Lord of the Dance belt’ before he kicks some dance-move ass. The baddies have weird skull helmets and there’s Dan Toporowski style skull faces projected on the background.
Intermingled with this narrative was a selection of group and solo pieces which are all glamour and not really about sexuality. There’s a scene where a stage full of female dancers rip off their dresses and dance in their underwear (I think that’s where the wolf whistle appeared on the soundtrack - I imagined a soundboard with a channel labelled ‘wolf-wistle’.) and on the one hand it was a ropey idea but it was all about glamour and not about titillation as the dancework they were doing wasn’t attempting to be sexy.
It’s an interesting aspect that in it’s way, most of the show is as chaste as the ballet I saw earlier in the year. I’m always interested in the purpose of dance, as it is communication. Hybrid Irish/contemporary dancing is so steeped in tradition that all of those little movement cues that were probably incredibly hot when they were put together to represent femininity at the time and allusions to folk images like fertility, squash any notion of sexuality to a contemporary audience as it is so traditionally steeped.
Tellingly, when the solo dancers were allowed to be sultry, most of the dancing eschewed the most traditional movements. The purpose of lord of the Dance, crazy narratives aside is purely celebratory. The thing that Flatley is capturing that will appeal to ten thousand/millions of people is a joyous celebration of life enacted without too much metaphorical camouflage by incredibly skilled and hard working performers.
The point here is that this is ‘what people want’ and a lot of art is about ‘what can I do when I don’t do ‘what people want’, striving to be ‘interesting’ or ‘challenging’. When you look at ‘people’ as the bulk of people, when your audience isn’t necessarily specialised (going to 40 shows a year) you need the basic glamorous spectacles presented by performers doing things that the audience could NEVER do to impress that many people.
You have to be an actual genius to find these things and make them work without cynicism (the audience will smell that) or condescension. I think Flatley gets to go over the edge because his intentions are absolutely pure.
I also see it as a metaphor for right wing rather than left wing politics. In the same way that right wingers GET THINGS DONE because there is no internal debates or side-views or compromises. The Right wing dystopia is to see a goal and make it happen, get on board for a greater good, be part of something big and powerful. It is a dystopia but it has a lot to teach the left with it’s constant watering down and intellectual asides, democracy and ideas of fair play and the way things ‘should be’. Lord of the dance doesn’t flounder on the debate about whether the fiddle players should play live, Flatley has heard the tape, it sounds amazing and he makes the decision. He even admits, ‘a great army needs a great general and a great general needs a great army’.
Flatley is a phenomenon in itself and really the icing on the cake. The guy is in his fifties and while he’s in great shape he has spent a few years with a kind of post-viral debilitating illness. I’d liken him to a famous Spanish dancer, past their prime with an amazing past but where affection and history bring the audience to them more than half way. My guess is he used to give himself more to do but physically limits himself, costume and flash give him an edge over the other dancers as well as his place as the star but he’s a funny guy as a performer. He mixes matador-style proud masculine movements with the most merrie melodies flicks and quick movements that make me laugh like Chaplin does. I’m sure these are not meant to be funny but I think it’s another side to him and reduces a sense of arrogance. I suspect that he’s aware of how much ridicule what he does comes under from all quarters (quarters not worth £600million pounds) and tries to be gracious about it while probably being annoyed.
He’s also larger than his skin. He looks so normal but his roles are so heroic that for me, that’s where the biggest human humour lay in the show. There was a lingering bit where the jester’s penny whistle had been broken by the baddies (I know, I know) and Michael does a bit of business about not being able to fix it before producing a new one. It’s too long and he just looks like a dad acting badly in front of his kids but he’s projecting a heroic warrior in their calmer moments.
I loved it for the same reasons I love Hollywood. It takes a very special person to take the reins of a project THAT huge, inject style and content that goes over the edge enough to create a FUCKING SHOW, OK that person is likely to be a megalomaniac but maybe they need to be to have the self belief to take all of that on.
Anyway, Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance, I salute you!