THE ARTS:BRING COMFY shoes if you're going along to Dance Marathon during Cork's Midsummer Festival. You're going to need them, writes MICHAEL SEAVER
The work, by Toronto-based collective Bluemouth Inc, will condense a Depression-era dance marathon into three or four hours and anyone who turns up will find themselves right in the middle of the action. After a quick warm-up, couples will be paired up and the non-stop dancing will begin. Throughout the evening, dancers will be eliminated and the winners receive a prize.
But the event isn't just a competition. Company members and local dancers are hidden among the audience and some real theatre will emerge during the performance. Best known through Sydney Pollack's Oscar-winning film, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?starring Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin, dance marathons emerged during the 1920s with other endurance spectacles such as flagpole sitting and "noun and verb rodeos" (non-stop speaking contests). The winners weren't necessarily the most elegant dancers, just the couple that lasted longest. Dancing 24 hours a day, the contestants were allowed 15 minutes of rest every hour, when they would sleep on camp beds. Some of the longer marathons went on for weeks and partners were allowed to sleep slumped in the other dancer's arms as long as their knees didn't touch the floor and the other dancer kept moving.
If attendance dropped off, organisers would stage elimination contests such as Zombie Treadmills (blindfold races with couples often tied together), which usually attracted reporters, live radio and a surge in audience numbers. Light meals were provided, sometimes up to 12 a day, which was one reason the events hit their peak of popularity during the Depression. For participants they offered not just the possibility of a big money prize, but food and a roof over their heads. For audiences they provided cheap entertainment – for 25 cents they could watch for as long as they wanted – and a feeling of superiority from watching others suffer. In their heyday, dance marathons were extremely popular and employed an estimated 20,000 people as promoters, masters of ceremonies, floor judges, trainers, nurses and contestants. But they were not always desirable, according to Carol Martin, author of Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture of the 1920s and 1930s."Many cities and states began to pass ordinances banning dance marathons on the grounds that they threatened the lives of contestants, that they were unregulated, that they attracted undesirable elements, and that the promoters often were con men," she says.
Bluemouth’s performance will distill the dance marathon experience into a few hours, although initial plans were for an event held over several days where the audience could come and go.“Soon we realised that even though the work was about exhaustion, it didn’t necessarily need to be exhausting or an enduring piece for the audience or ourselves,” says director Stephen O’Connell.
While workshopping the piece with invited audiences, he found that the audience goes into a natural fatigue anyway, after about two hours into the show. “After that stage, into the third hour, the energy gathers again, as the competition is ratcheted up a bit. Everybody who comes along will have to participate initially, although you don’t have to bring a partner. Even if you do, you will get paired off with a stranger for part of the evening. The first eliminations will occur after about 15 minutes, although couples can dance – but obviously no longer compete – after elimination.
The original dance marathons weren’t just honest competitions, but highly manipulated events. The audiences could take vicarious pleasure in witnessing the pain, while the MC gave a cheery gloss of reassurance that it was all just good fun. Frequently rigged, professional dancers were sprinkled among the competitors. The most famous of these was the ex-vaudeville star June Havoc. As a child star she earned up to $1,500 a week, but when the Depression struck she competed in marathons and held the all-time record of 3,600 hours (about five months) in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1934. “Our degradation was entertainment; sadism was sexy; masochism was talent,” she said in a 1993 interview.
The Jazz Age of the 1920s offered people opportunities for public self-expression in an increasingly media-driven world, according to Patrick Huber, co-author of The 1920s. The possibility of celebrity drove people to increasingly bizarre feats of endurance. Paradoxically, even the most ridiculous fads offered a way for people to strike their individualism and also to feel part of a larger group.“There are many similarities to today’s obsession with reality TV, where an ordinary person with a modicum of talent can gain fame based on the mass media,” says Huber.
Today’s television audiences, like the spectators at dance marathons, can watch people suffer – these days, watching people eating grubs and competing for firewood on a desert island. The entertainment, in both cases, comes from the mix of reality and the manipulation by organisers or television producers. The space – television or theatre – is controlled but the action is “real” and reflects the unpredictability of everyday life. And there is also the playing out of social Darwinism in the struggle for survival. “Dance at dance marathons was not the expression of freedom from a home-based economy of subsistence living, but the dance of those condemned to the subsistence economy of wage labour,” says Carol Martin. “The land of opportunity was a cruel myth. And yet contestants clung to it, danced for it, and gave their youth to it.”
THE DANCE MARATHONSwere a reflection of their time, but in these recessionary times there are metaphors that can be eked out and O'Connell sees similarities between audiences' expectations in the 1930s and the present. "Reality TV is similarly exploitative, but it is unbelievably popular, just like the dance marathons in their day," he says. Like the originals, Bluemouth's dance marathon will be fixed somewhat. Company members will be hidden in the cast (although they will become more obvious later in the evening), and will keep an eye on audience members and possibly manipulate the result. "We are looking for people with real talent in the audience, like in a reality TV series," says O'Connell, adding that natural ability always emerges throughout the evening. "Ultimately, this piece isn't about the Bluemouth performers. It's about the audience. Everything that goes on during the evening becomes part of the piece."
Things will be spiced up with a guest celebrity spot and Bluemouth members have been in situ in Cork for a week, working with local musicians who will join the in-house band and dancers who will mingle with the audience. So how competitive does it get? “We were surprised by how competitive it can become,” he says. “And it’s not just about winning the prize. People become obsessively competitive just about making it to the end.” Nevertheless, things become less cut-throat as more couples are eliminated. “At the end, when there are just two couples left, it actually becomes more joyous and celebratory,” he says.
Although a distillation of the original, O'Connell can still see a natural Darwinian process at work. " Dance Marathonoperates at different levels that resonate with ordinary life. You come to the event, get paired up with someone you don't know, get to learn about them and compete against others. The piece is really about the human experience," he says.
Dance Marathontakes place in the Spiegeltent from Monday June 22nd to Thursday June 25th as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival, which continues around the city until June 28th