The Brooklyn Rail

As house lights dim, the skeletal frame of a car appears; gliding, it seems to drive itself from the wings towards center stage. Its welded steel form is partially clad in transparent plastic that cocoons fog rolling across the stage, at once evoking a bootleg greenhouse and the cybernetic endoskeleton of an assassin from The Terminator. A hooded human figure, adorned in a rhinestoned Juicy Couture tracksuit, mounts the vehicle’s transparent hood. Lying back, the machine appears to control its passenger, who is absorbed into the mechanical body as their legs scissor through the air. As more dancers enter from the wings, donning hair braids, nylon scarves covering their faces, and matching Juicy tracksuits, two sky blue receiver tanks stored in the vehicle’s interior launch the car’s pneumatic system. In a scene inspired by Grand Theft Auto, the company clambors on and around the vehicle, breaking out in fights. To a score of hard, high-BPM techno sampled by British producer Gabber Eleganza, the skeleton thrashes, and the bodies of the dancers alongside with violent exuberance.

As the car’s frame hurdles across the stage, I am teleported to time spent living and working as an architectural designer for François Roche, kingpin of the 1990s digital extravagance that the performance exuberantly resuscitates. From Roche’s office on the outskirts of Paris, I slept on a camping cot beneath a six-axis KUKA robot which I would remote control as playfully as a toy car. This Sunday, though, I am attending a matinee at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) which concludes a weekend of performances of Age of Content by LA(HORDE), the artist collective which has directed the National Ballet of Marseilles since 2019. In addition to the car, scenographer Julien Peissel constructed a catwalk, metal staircase, hydraulic garage door, and haphazardly stacked pile of cardboard boxes to frame the stage, evoking the austere placelessness of a logistics center. Within its interior, the sixteen dancers perform a choreography of internet dances, subscription service horniness, and video game combat, emptied of human feeling. The influence of Demna—former creative director of Balenciaga, who presented his debut collection at Gucci a few days after Sunday’s closing matinee—is felt in the ensemble of shaggy-haired twinks moving stiffly like NPC avatars. The audience, seated comfortably within the interior of BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House as the strongest snowstorm in a decade blankets New York City outside, is presented with an extravagant vision for the end of the world which could have been hallucinated by a feverish AI.

In his seminal essay “Das Unheimliche,” Freud first described the uncanny as emerging from motion where one expects stasis—or the confusion of life and death—before ultimately defining it as something the conscious mind represses but which returns.¹ As (La)Horde’s first dancer, a car, jolts awake beneath its human companion, uncanniness is raised through both: the animation of the vehicle’s inert form surfaces themes of dependency and subjection, relations we typically repress in the theater of public life.² One performer remote controls the machine while observing the company from the catwalk; their character, who evokes a floor supervisor, leaves the audience uncertain whether they are a dancer with the company or a window into the direction structuring the stage. Their control of the vehicle thus mirrors the practices of subordination which always choreograph a dance ensemble, while the performance itself translates and reappropriates the audience’s everyday experiences, wherein our relations are increasingly mediated and recorded by digital technology. Indeed, its title is a play on the age at which a person becomes legally competent to consent to sexual activity, society’s ultimate form of coercion. And just as uncanniness emerges from the abrupt animation of the car’s form, so too is it raised by the perceived injection of virtual avatars into the human bodies of the dancers, which come to resemble the lifeless digital puppets that populate our images and videos. Stillness where we expect life, plastered with vacant smiles. The rapid disappearance of honesty and truth at the hands of digital role-play and increasingly organic screens.

(LA)HORDE fills the crevices hollowed by our eroding moral commitments with extravagant, cringe-worthy, and high-octane release. Beauty itself is found in this spilling over: not within our physical environments (which increasingly resemble the logistics center of Peissel’s stage), not from our articles of clothing (which have never been more poorly constructed), but in erotic configurations, prosthetic fantasies, and collective rebellion. It is found in the cacophonous humping of the ensemble and violent gyrations of the car, which reach their climax in the maniacal screams of the company above Philip Glass’s score in the final act. These exclamations of desire exceed the practical, refuse the productive, and lay to waste the ironic and indifferent. They remind us that extravagance, especially between queer and marginalized communities, has always provided a meeting point between different imaginaries and social groups. Often through attendant tropes of opulence and luxury, it provides an unenclosed and unpredictable space for us to abandon our fascistic worlds and enter into ways of living that gesture toward freedom.

Off of Peissel’s stage, our work as architects increasingly forecloses these extravagant possibilities. Instead, our disciplinary conversations are dominated by an austerity-driven orientation toward practicality and puritanical expectations of material authenticity. These commitments, reflected in the American interest in light timber framing, reflect at their core the pretext for most conservative movements.³ Through them, we have collectively repressed the capacity of architecture to respond to our lived condition, one which feels increasingly unbelievable, corrupt, and thanatic. Very few among us—with exceptional projects including Marc Leschelier’s fabric huts or David Eskenazi’s deflated paper models—work to acknowledge, let alone capture, the zeitgeist. (LA)HORDE, too, raises our fragile vulnerability as subject matter, cleaving fertile ground between states of stability and collapse. Their performance emerges from an era in which cultural production rarely emerges from legacy institutions, and increasingly from online communities, the street, and anti-disciplinary discourse. When their performance began, my friend leaned over. “It’s the ghost of your Subaru,” she whispered, recalling the vehicle I totaled on an empty highway one month prior, itself a jolting reminder of the uncanny nearness of death. And then—as quickly as it started—the lights rose, the dream ended, and I woke up.