RELÂCHE: THE LAST DANCE ON EARTH
I like Second Echo. They have now made potent work for many years; they make consistently experimental work, and they do this from the basis of being a genuine artistic community that interrogates itself with some constancy, and pushes up against the conceptions of what Second Echo even is, or is supposed to be. They don’t exactly do what you might expect.
Relâche was an unabashed experimental live work. It contained dance, performance-poetry reading, some experimental video, some film, quite a bit of music, including some really wild live work. A genuine effort made to integrate the audience into the performance as more than passive observers; paper costumes were on offer, so the audience became very much a part of the work, and there was an interactive bedlam occurring before the ‘show’ proper even got going. I saw a hybrid beast that had various heads.
I don’t know if I am convinced this was Dada – and this is me being a pedant, so take this as you will. Dada was an art movement, or an anti-art movement, that happened in varying places around the world after the first world war and into the twenties. Dada had no defined aesthetic and took in a wide range of art forms, it was crucial to the development of art in the 20th Century, and it established that art can protest or react to current events and developments; if there was something that really unified the varying pocket and mutations of Dada it’s that it was a reaction to the first world war, particularly the mechanized nature of that conflict and how that enabled and caused a truly horrific loss of life and untold other cultural impacts.
It depends which Dada you look at, but it’s pretty accurate to say that most of Dada was in some way a criticism of the world that allowed something like the first world war to occur.
Dada is a moment, and there’s been a lot of other art since. Dada ended, and other ways of making art emerged to examine culture, or be vilified and praised and debated. Dada was a century ago.
I could also claim Dada failed – I mean, there was a Second World War. The war to end all wars did no such thing, and the great Modernist project of the first half of the twentieth century led to some of the most terrifying atrocities of human history, that we still have not really dealt with, and art that has attempted to tackle it in some way is quite often too much, or vilified. Everyone has heard of Dada, not so many people have heard of Viennese Aktionism, and Yoko Ono is still thought of by a tremendous amount of people as John Lennon’s widow rather than an intensely crucial Fluxus artist.
Dada is still fascinating and its images still hold power, but if all you do in your art is look back to an art movement from a hundred years ago, forgive me, but I might question the wisdom of this.
However, Second Echo didn’t do that (phew), instead, they did something that was pretty subversive. Let’s also note they were looking at one specific event that occurred under the Dada ‘umbrella’, a 1924 ballet performance with a score by Erik Satie. ‘Dada’ was a bit of a smokescreen to sneak some other ideas through, and there was a collage of moments and visions that gestured to other moments of chaos in the arts throughout the years since Dada; the presence of a Rhinoceros mask took me to the 1959 play Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco, one of the cornerstones of what was called the Theatre of the Absurd; that particular play has been interpreted as about the onset of fascism or more broadly, rigid mindsets. This has some potency in the world we now live in. There’s also reference to ‘the party of the century’ – the Black and White costume ball that Truman Capote held in November 1966; the costumes shared with the audience served this allusion well. So, along with anti-art, absurdity and decadence.
I mention all this because I saw this event as an amalgam of weird and complex culture and art, with bits of this and echoes of that all through it. This is very appropriate for right now. In 2025, we have access to an astounding amount of human cultural output, and much of it exists beyond the strictures of copyright, and using it seems crucial: we get new culture from old culture, from using what exists and asking what we can say about where we are. Relâche (the Second Echo production) had a large amount going on, and there was an undercurrent in it about using that access we have. Art is very good at this, because art does not have the same strictures as history might: Art can use culture as material, making new meaning out of old.
The word Relâche means, at least in this context[1], cancelled. This would have been its own joke in the original era, in 1924, seen as a poster on a theatre; while here in 2025, cancelled has come to mean quite something else in some contexts. That the title of this work is at least a pun around the idea of Being Cancelled is at least interesting; and at best quite damn hilarious, and there are many jokes implied – but the overall comment is this: we are not going to do what you expect us to do. This tonal setting for the whole show is important; there’s a desired shift here on the part of the company as to how they present themselves and their art.
I can’t help but admire this – it’s incredibly tempting for anyone in the arts, on finding a mode that works for them, to keep reproducing that mode. Messing with the formula is a good idea, and the tropes of Dada become useful tools here, tweaking the work into a chaotic presentation that took this production into uncharted territory.
This was a cabaret-style format, with differing set-works bleeding and oozing in and out of each other – which was filled with striking imagery, live music and dance. This is where the sheer reliability of this company really shone through; everything looked great, it all functioned well and there was some awesome mood generated, which was not pretty, but aggressive, spiky, peculiar and even a bit threatening in moments.
A camera filmed the performance as it occurred; This captured imagery was manipulated by some kind of Artificial Intelligence filter (or something) that changed what we were seeing: a cascade of imagery, rippling and jerking like a clockwork snake hatching from a ceramic egg; the uncanny valley scraped across the performance, making it strange and projecting that onto some oddly-hung screens that floated above the stage area, so there was a strange doubling going on. The live performers were granted unreal digital monster twins that floated over them, never still.
I’m not against AI, I must note here. What I am against is shoddy, barely understood technology being driven by artless tech-dorks who have never been in a gallery in their lives thinking their tech is amazing because solely because it works, barely[2]. I understand you have spent so long inside it that you are deeply excited about what you have made, and I am as well, really, but the end product is not all that good, and it has rapidly descended into cliché. It didn’t even take that long.
I am also against greedy corporate entities making rubbish end product solely because they do not want to pay an artist or designer or writer, which has not all that much to do with AI as a thing and lot to do with greedy corporate entities ripping people off, which I might point out is Nothing New At All[3].
I have been seeing artists use AI in varying ways and it's actually been rather heartening. There is huge potential there for some really new forms of art to emerge, and for radical change and evolution in the arts. After all, the advent of photography did not, as was predicted, destroy painting. It changed painting and bought on great experimentation, and the new painting that emerged remains powerful and astonishing. If Dada in its original impetus was in part about reacting to mechanisation and mass culture, then something like this production incorporating AI and really cutting loose with it in a live way was the most actual Dada moment of the show. I liked how it looked, and there was some glorious and queasy imagery, but what was important to me was that it was happening. It’s probably not the first live thing to do this, but it’s the first I’ve seen, and this is a moment of cultural change that sits up there with Du Champs exhibition of a urinal as an art object. I can’t say this enough: the artists who are seizing new technology and leaping into the dark with it are the artists we need. Do not let AI take your job and eat your work. Seize it and bend it to your will. However small that step might be, there it was, and it worked and had moments where it really succeeded, had moments when I stopped seeing it as Clever Tech and found myself thinking “my god, I want David Cronenberg to see this”. All the horror, liberation and shock of the new was right there, cascading, screaming, ugly and brilliant and gorgeous in implication and effect.
In contrast, after a break there was a film projected on a hanging cube. This was a homage to Entracte, the film originally shown in the production of Relâche, shot by Rene Clair, a crucial early film maker who lived a long time, fell in and out of favour, and made a tremendous amount of work. Entracte is interesting from a number of perspectives, not in the least the cast – a number of significant Dada figures are in it. Making a homage/riff on it was a risky gambit, but the film found its way with a gorgeously strange sequence set on a rocky shore, with the cast disappearing in a moving ritual that was genuinely cryptic and occult. It was beautiful to see, although, I wished I could have seen the actual film as shot (it looked like this was transfer from 16mm film), but that would have been impractical I GUESS, although given how daring the rest of the show was technically it might have been made to work, although I did like the strange floating cube this work was projected onto. I like the materiality of film, and it did offer a textural juxtaposition to the AI usage.
Another dance sequence followed, some beautiful singing emerged and the politics really started coming out. This was what I’d been waiting for: something about now. We are at a strange moment in this world right now. I think it’s crucial art takes this on, However I need make art that works to do more than state the obvious – or to put it another way, I know Trump is bad news.
I knew that, and so did you.
I know this is a big ask, but there is a kind paralysis occurring as we follow the cascade of news, as the zone is flooded, and we need to recall, we have been told, this is a tactic to keep us off balance, to treat the media as the opponent, treat the audience with contempt and keep their heads spinning, to keep us ineffective before a deluge of horror, horrified, paralyzed.
A very well realised and timed movement sequence took us into the zone of interest: An audio collage featuring a lot of political leaders including Trump thundered and disturbed, in keeping with the chaotic forms we’d been experiencing, the thrilling music[4], the everything, and it was very well done, but I’d heard it before; I was thinking I could have done without this when something else happened.
A most fierce and dignified calm emerged.
The screens, now much stiller, showed me this island, this Lutruwita.
There as a pause, and then a voice. I know this voice instantly, yet I have not heard it anywhere near as much as the braying squawk of all the others I had just heard. Then I knew exactly why I’d heard those voices; so I could properly hear this one.
How different this voice was.
How calm, how measured, how paced it was.
Uncle Jim Everett puralia meenamatta spoke, and everything swirling around in my head ceased.
This was the surprising, and crucial center of this production. This seized my mind, softly demanded I listen, gave me something special. How are we to survive? Perhaps we might listen to the voice of those who have already lived through an apocalypse. Perhaps we might learn from those who have known, and still know, horror. They may well have something to teach us, and at that moment, this one voice really did.
This succinct reading was effective and enormous, and much of what Relâche had been doing was to create an environment where Uncle Jim might have the most impact. This is not the only thing going on here of course, but if we’re going to note superb structure, here it is: accurate and so pointed it stung. It threw everything else into relief and it was clearly meant to; and here was the subversion, crafted with precision, made into a genuine moment where I was given no choice but to think about solutions to the dark present and terrifying future.
The best thing about this production was its notion of community. Everyone who wanted a moment was given one, the technical staff were visible in a pleasingly Brechtian way that said this is theatre and performance, this is illusion, don’t get caught in how clever we are, think about what we are saying and showing. There were lots of great individual moments of poetry and exchange, but I was most rewarded by the unified power of a community functioning together to create and explore; I loved how the spirit of Dada was used to bring the techniques to now and to say something about now, because something that looked backwards would. Have. Sucked.
What did this really have to say? Well, there’s a lot, but I felt I was being shown resources and techniques to use the past as a guide to the future, and that actually, resources exist in libraries to be used, that new art is on its way and learning to use it will be important – these are our new tools, and we better learn them so we can use them – like come ON, have you seen that stupid AI about Gaza some Trump aides churned out? So embarrassing. The AI in this show had more gumption and originality, and I liked its roughness, because it was its own thing. Art isn’t static. Art is where we find the new, artists to take the new tools, pull them apart and use them in ways the people who made them never thought of because that is what artists always do.
This was such a good show, but it was good not because I was swept up by how clever it was; it was good because it had some parts that worked better than others, it was awesome because it was actually experimental in a number of ways, it surprised me, it had a couple of things that really hit home and were really just human and beautiful, as well as being awkward and raw and real.
I wandered out after chatting variously as the set was being rapidly pulled apart, thinking and wondering about what I had seen, filled up with questions and ideas. I tracked around the dark streets of Nipaluna, considering the actual value of art as a tool of protest.
I got my Uber home, lost in thought, all the images and moments vying for my attention.
What does good art do?
It opens your mind.
[1] Translation is an odd game. There’s an idea, a conceit, that words translate directly from culture to culture. Relâche does not consistently mean cancelled; it could also mean, depending on circumstance, a pause or interruption, or a sort of time out. There’s no such thing as direct translation, and if you think about it, claiming there is (“this word means this in English”) is a subtle form of colonialism, in that it removes contextual nuance peculiar to the language and historical moment of the people using it. I could also say something similar about the word Dada, but you get the idea.
[2][2] In fairness, I should note as well the problems of Large Language Models and image generation using the copyright owned work of actual people. This is bad news, clearly, but let’s note it is also obscenely lazy: there is a LOT of material in existence that is legally available in The Public Domain, which should provide more than enough sources. I’m also aware that at this point the problem of AI and copyright issues seem to be being largely ignored, and I’m actually keen to see what an AI that only uses public domain-based material will produce.
[3] I will also say, artists, think twice about your work on social media; you might get instant gratification, but you will not get much else, and you are worth more than that. Those “I deny permission for Meta to use anything” copy pastes don’t mean a thing, and when you use them, you are sort of doing the thing you are railing about anyway. AI is not the culprit; it’s the same actual enemy it has always been.
[4] I really have not written enough about the music but it was marvellous, hearing it live was WILD and watching two people play piano at once was nuts; I am unlikely to see this again and it deserves at the very very least a footnote.
