The Brooklyn Rail

The lobby of BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, when I arrive, is buzzing with Brooklyn’s creative scene. Along with the city’s usual dance community, some of the guests have arrived straight from fashion week shows—the algorithm appears to have targeted the appropriate crowd for a program about content creation. As part of the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival last month, the French collective (LA)HORDE brought the Ballet national de Marseille to perform the much-hyped Age of Content. The collective has toured this piece since 2023, garnering substantial press for its entwinement of contemporary dance with political engagement.

It is clear why this production has been so successful: Age of Content is a visually striking show in which the separation between the virtual and (corpo)real is blurred, questioning how, in the digital age, our identities are formed.

The star of the opening scene is a hydraulic car with a transparent hood and an open exoskeleton that reveals its inner emptiness. A group of masked genderless characters—of seemingly homogenous identity, all clad in green-screen-green track suits—attempt to mount the machine, fighting each other for the spotlight with pseudo-karate moves. They all clamber to claim the stage of the hood, from where they raise their hands in exaggerated victory to the sound of distant cheering, only to be quickly dethroned by the next dancer. From above a metal scaffolding, reminiscent of an Amazon warehouse, a man in a red polo shirt and blue jeans suggestive of a tech bro apathetically operates the car that the dancers covet. “Who is really in control? Why do we truly want the things we want?” are two of Age of Content’s main themes.

The repetitive scene culminates in an overstimulating explosion—dancers yell and punch the air, lights flash, and a pounding beat fills the room. Clinging to the empty car, without a clear victor, the fighters are taken off the stage by the mechanical beast.

In the emptiness left behind, several avatar-like characters spawn to life. Their identities, though more defined than those of the first act, are ready-made, plucked from the archetypes of video games like Grand Theft Auto. Here, the dancers excel at bringing to life a movement language usually restricted to pixels: they walk in comically rigid steps, they buoy in place, they quickly shift directions, they abruptly change attitudes and take up fighting positions, then revert to their emotionless base state, ready to receive their next commands. The two leading characters, brilliantly played by Aya Sato and Jonatan Myhre Jørgensen, tease each other, then take turns commanding the crews to fight. An undercurrent of violence pulses throughout the performance, and even when the two characters reconcile, harmony is hardly an option, as several avatars take turns controlling others by the mouth with fishhook finger grips.

The pantomime of violence fades into an entertaining, but ultimately vacuous, section of floor humping, more parodic than overtly sexual. Desire is just a spectacle; sex is domination, a simple game of who rides whom. With little connection to the preceding scenes, and a tired repetition of booty dribbling, this act felt like an unnecessary prolongation of one good idea.

The final number—set to Phillip Glass’s “The Grid” and referencing Lucinda Child’s postmodern choreography—breaks out into an overly-excited flash mob in which the dancers, donning stretched smiles, boisterously express themselves with the saccharine joy of a musical. Is this a celebration? The euphoric energy suggests it is. But after the third repetition of the ecstatic scene, which borrows vocabulary from internet trends—including plenty of chest popping, finger jabbing, and, once again, booty dribbling—the mask of artificial joy slips and reveals the terrifying truth of performativity underneath.

With its harrowing mood and stark depiction of a generation whose bodies and selves are determined by images on the screen, Age of Content aims toward social critique—of those who, like the man operating the hydraulic car, control our identities and behaviors from afar; of those who, like the dancers in the final act, blindly adopt their digital personas and vie for attention. Its breadth of movement ideas gives the work visual strength, but ultimately weakens its criticism as the connections between them are often undeveloped. The hydraulic car, though impressively choreographed, comes off as a cool trick; the booty bouncing is diverting, but overdone.

Consequently, there is a tension between Age of Content’s critical perspective and formal features: each frame of this seventy-five-minute show is perfectly composed, ready to appear in a ten-second loop or a visually striking promotional video. Perhaps we are meant to witness content creation in the making. But since its many aestheticized moments remain undeveloped and isolated, Age of Content inadvertently propagates the image fetishization it aims to denounce.

This tension incites the question of how artists of the digital age can aptly critique the homogenizing forces of social media without falling into the same content-creation cycle. Bringing the language of the screen to the stage requires a careful control of the irony this creates—lest the stage become a set for the screen. Nevertheless, it’s apparent that, with programming that probes these social questions, and a commitment to diverse perspectives, (LA)HORDE holds the right elements to provoke political reflection with contemporary dance. If only the audience will listen.

As the curtain fell, the crowd rose to give a standing ovation—and take a photo for their Instagram stories.