GRIEF IN PROGRESS is BULLYACHE doing a sad music show.
A violent eulogy that sounds like a ballad and hits like an exorcism. A lead singer and an ensemble of backing dancers cannibalise heartbreak, death and loss for entertainment, exhausting themselves in an economy of misery until the grief makes them vomit blood.
It’s about mining pain to create shows, identity content to fill a hole, our suicides, poverty, marginalisation and discrimination as a song and dance, and the absurdity of turning this into performance. The work is a rejection and celebration of this trope. It’s an ecstatic ouroboros of suffering.
A gig staged at Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” where nothing can succeed Capitalist styled Democracy, the show references historical events such as Judy Garland in deep addiction playing show tunes months before her death; the capital buy-in of youth cultures resulting in the logistical and humanitarian disaster of Woodstock 99; it’s Kevin Spacey tap dancing in Tel Aviv.
How can you express anything without turning it into another commodity? What happens when grief is no longer moving, inspiring or transformative, but simply exhausting? We don't want to offer audiences another redemptive story about pain, we want to question the transaction itself.