Missives from Months Lost: Un peu de tendresse bordel de merde

My brother was staying the night I saw this. June 3rd 2011. I hadn't seen him for ages and I knew he was at home with wine and food and friends, so my mind wasn't on this show. Plus I'd had a really good day of workshops with a group of TDA alumni, and I just wanted a beer in the sun.

The Sadlers Wells website says:

Un peu de tendresse bordel de merde! is about the search for love and the human form. Using humour to tackle taboo subjects, it features 20 dancers, naked both literally and figuratively. A narrator leads the audience on a journey through their emotions as the performers leap with a primal urgency, or lie crumpled and defeated on the ground, before climaxing in a breathtakingly beautiful and moving finale.

I failed to make it that far -I made to an hour and twenty minutes then had to leave. As soon as I got on the bus I started scribbling -

So little to do with either ferocity, brutality or tenderness that perhaps that's what kept the audience: there must be something coming, there must be something.
It hated men and it hated women. And it seemed to hate itself but not in any way that might have illuminated or changed our attitudes or lives. Not at all.
Not even the sensational or the sensationalist. It made me feel scared of sex and intimacy and other people. It worried - no it confirmed, in those 80 minutes - a (ridiculous and unfeeling) notion that human beings just want to hurt each other or consume everything in one gulp. There was no link, no real judgement or new message or revelation about how humans are or why humans are the way they are. Even a disrespect of the dancers, their faith and their bodies. Because we never saw the bodies being honest or open

NUDITY

but never nakedness. Not rawness. Not a truth. Not one truth or exposure.

The opening five minutes very promising - an impassioned and desperate attempt to breach an impasse - the woman reaching and grabbing more and more for the other, seeking tenderness. The first man's passivity = symptomatic of the whole show. Its complete lack of empathy, compassion or the HUMAN. As he turned his back on this heaving woman's body so too the entire piece turned its back on us and on 'tendresse', never to make any link between why a disconnect between audience and performer, lover and lover, consumer and product MIGHT ACTUALLY BE WORTH DANCING ABOUT. it made life feel redundant.

...

why does a show like this gain so much press? because the idea of parading nudity as an 'idea' is so totally unexamined by a bodydead/braindead society and media that we give it the kind of credence and authority it NEVER MERITS NOR WORKS FOR.
We've been flipped over and fisted into submissions, not penetrated by anthing resembling something reproducutive something that might generate ideas, seeds, new connections.

A lot of that writing is a bit cringy and extreme, in retrospect. But it did manage to hit a really tender nerve, not of outrage at nudity (yawn) but outrage at how it treated people. I think it's the only show I can remember having left before the finish. It also sounds like the angriest I've been in a while. I remember bubbling and boiling on the bus.

What was the most irritating was the feeling of exploitation. For a brief second I regretted leaving, thinking that perhaps the finale was a worthwhile tonic. But then emerging onto the street, several others had already given up and were having cigarettes outside, with haunted and exhausted looks. They weren't going back either; what came before was enough to make it beyond redemption. Jenny Gilbert's review in the Independent:

The tone darkens markedly after the cast put their clothes back on. In a crude steal from Pina Bausch the men shout "Frappe-moi!" and hit themselves hard in the face, over and over. In another sequence, Sabrina is offered the choice between a man and a chocolate cake. She takes off her knickers and goes for the cake.

I remember that bit. Just before I tipped over the edge. And whilst very often the intense anger I feel watching a show gives way to a more sustained realisation after I leave, I still think the same thing about Un peu de tendresse. I just feel a lot less. And what did the haunted smokers and I miss when we left? Not much, it seems:

Despite the plea implicit in its title, there is a good deal more bordel than tendresse in this long and often tediously barbaric show. Only in the final minutes does peace descend, as the 24 dancers, naked once more (but who really cares?) skid silently about the wet stage surface like seals at play, finally curling up as happy couples.