THE KARDASHIAN TRILOGY

One perfectly reasonable question is why exactly have we made a trilogy of shows named after the Kardashian sisters.

A first and short-ish answer would run like this: the three texts in this book, and the shows that hold them, were the product of a series of unusual commissions and work done at speed. 

It all started at the end of 2015 when we were invited to make a show with the Balé da Cidade de Palmas, a young ballet company in Tocantins, Brazil, and we decided to call it Kim Kardashian. After making that show in the spring of 2016 we joked, vaguely, that if we made a sequel it would be called either Kim Gordon or Khloé Kardashian, and by the summer of 2017 – when we were invited to make a show with Theatre and Performance students at the Arden in Manchester. And then after that, having come so far, we figured that if we were ever going to do Kourtney, the only way we could follow up a ballet and a conventional stage play would be with an opera…and then a very short while after that we were invited, more or less out of the blue, to propose something for the Festival de Clásicos en Alcalá, for which an opera was a weirdly good fit… And so now here we are. Sometimes that’s just how these things go.

A second version of an answer: the fact is of course that the three sisters are a pretty neat synecdoche for a whole frenzy of 21st century obsessions and anxieties, for the blurring together of the real and the unreal and for our Extremely Online lives lived as much as anything to be looked at, watched, by others and by ourselves. Kim Kardashian especially seems like the first celebrity who’s truly native to this dazzling new age: where with her predecessors there was always a degree of separation between their public and private personae – the sense (knowledge?) that what we were seeing was to some extent or other performed – with KK it’s completely possible to believe that her public persona is who she actually is. There may be, in a sense, no other face behind the mask. And there’s a near-terrifying kind of honesty at work here (I mean, just imagine), a starkly naked truthfulness (we may be projecting here but still), a realness that is realer than real whatever, if anything, that’s supposed to mean.

This is some of what we saw in this trilogy: a surface of stilted formality and domestic banality with this overwhelming rush of emotion – of music – running irrepressibly beneath it; a scattering of family albums, all overlain until they become indistinguishable from each other; real live bodies dancing with a body willingly transformed – meticulously, ruthlessly – into pure image, depthless, flattened and manipulated to the point where it becomes almost hieroglyphic, like a new character in an alphabet that we haven’t really learnt to read yet.

What we’re left with in the end is this: a three-part dream or nightmare about beauty and history and excess and money and art and boredom and bliss, in which we see a woman dragging a swarm of pink balloons across a stage littered with banknotes, a man dressed as a bear getting shot with a nerf gun and lying dead in a pile of fake snow, two women dressed in emergency blankets eating gold leaf in a cloud of haze… Three shows made quickly and almost by mistake and then performed only a handful of times.

There is a book that survived them, and you can find it here.