a Described as a cross between Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 ballet Manon and Paul Verhoeven’s cult film Showgirls, the show is a must-see for its two tales of women using physical attractiveness as their only currency. Breeche’s Who Hurt You? is not as neat a concept as its description suggests, and is as messy as a lost weekend, but it is boldly self-assured, and the idea of performing to survive is one of the ideas spat out into its glittering, sweaty world.
It’s the second production from Jacob Samuel and Courtney Dean’s artistic collective Breeche, and the song-based piece is a cross between a live music video and avant-garde dance-theatre à la Les Ballets C’est de la B, but entirely immersed in young queer British culture.
Who Hurt You? centres around the character of a fallen drag queen played by London “drag slag” and classical pianist Barbs, who performs an epic Whitney Houston lip-sync and gradually approaches a mental breakdown. With Dean and Oscar Jin-Hoo Lee as back-up dancers, she pairs a loose grey tracksuit with a black thong and sequined bra for an intense performance of Latin dancing, with pulsating, grinding pelvis and staring gazes into the audience that give her sexy, creepy video babe moves. Magnus Westwell plays live violin.
The atmosphere oscillates between cold and connected, brutal and humorous. In the 1940s, the great dance critic Edwin Denby spoke about the simplest aim of criticism: Has something artistically interesting happened, and if so, what special flavour did it have? Well, Who Hurt You? definitely did. It’s something bubbling away in the dark underbelly of dance. It was thrilling to be there. And what was that flavour? The flavour of despair in every sense of the word. Misery, exhaustion, desperation for attention, admiration, desire. Nomi Malone in Manon or Showgirls might recognise it.
