The Emotional and Visual Overload of BULLYACHE

BULLYACHE’s latest performance, WHO HURT YOU? (2024), unravelled like a tale of desperate delusion, centring around the characters’ fight for validation and fame. The show was choreographed, scored and directed by Jacob Samuel and Courtney Deyn, who collaborated with the performers and rehearsal director Lewis Walker. It draws inspiration from Kenneth MacMillan's ballet Manon (1974) and Paul Verhoeven's film Showgirls (1995) and channels personal biography and trauma into sequential acts of campery and acerbic cries for help.​ Deyn, drag performer Barbs and dancer Oscar Li carried out a series of choreographed and lip-synced acts. Meanwhile, Samuel remained out of frame, manning a semi-live soundtrack of low-fi handbag house and power ballads. It was an intentionally uncomfortable watch, doused in vaudeville and slapstick. 

A backdrop of aluminium, illuminated by bright stage lights, was set behind a raised platform covered in a delicate layer of gossamer dust. To the stage right, two light-up mirrors stood, where all the performers periodically returned to touch-up their makeup. Indeed, no matter how often they whitened their faces or realigned their running, raspberry-hued eyeshadow, the performers inevitably looked like jam-filled doughnuts, each glazed in unset lip-gloss that only expedited their emotional and cosmetic meltdown. Li and Deyn told me that their marl tracksuits overlaid with black panties and beaded lingerie referenced Deyn’s childhood experiences as a ballroom dancer visiting Blackpool for competitions. Barbs, clad in a strappy red dress and brassy wig, performed as a scatty, narcissistic lead who acidly ribbed the crowd and seemed to be in a constant spiral of self-deprecation.

To start, Deyn and Li – in the role of Barbs’s backup dancers – pirouetted in unison to downtempo electro-pop that crescendoed into a pitched hyper-pop. The dancers embraced and straddled in claustrophobic unison, their hoods covering each other’s faces. Soon, the sound became deafening. Deyn and Li descend into a scuffle until Li tapped out, lifeless, on his back. I interpreted this moment as a trauma-dump: an episodic ‘overshare’ that, although coded, might allude to contemporary conflicts in queer art and nightlife spaces where community engagement is encouraged but sometimes tinged with infighting.

Back in the spotlight, Barbs delivered a rendition of Whitney Houston’s ‘All The Man That I Need’ (1990), jibing on the lyric ‘he fills me up’ with smutty gestures. When they finished, Barbs demanded the audience’s ovation before abruptly silencing them: a disturbing pattern they repeated in vicious cycles. Meanwhile, violinist Magnus Westwell took to the stage, stealing Barbs’s spotlight with a poignant solo that transformed the audience from a nervous crowd, dodging the lead’s prickly remarks, to a captivated one – illustrating the fleeting nature of mass attention.

At one point, Deyn approached the front row and addressed an attendee, mouthing a few words and pointing at the guest’s seat. The crowd’s proxy embarrassment was palpable, while the unfortunate woman could only laugh nervously. Besides Barbs’s interactions, this was the first time that a performer had crossed the fourth wall, providing a welcome pause from the show’s more gruelling, durational movements. By the end, Barbs was at breaking point, unable to land any jokes. They cursed the crowd, ordered a guest to throw them their handbag and began rustling through it for cigarettes, only to slam the packet on the floor. Post-show, they returned in character to collect the box and any last dregs of audience admiration.

Operating within a niche pocket of queer performance art and dance defined by public acts of confession and self-affliction, both emotional and physical, WHO HURT YOU? did not rely on exhibitionism or masochistic cues. Unlike their contemporaries, such as the Young Boy Dancing Group – a flexible troupe whose performances incorporate ritualistic elements of bondage, kink and bodily exploration – Samuel and Deyn seem more interested in a slow, grovelling desecration of character. Nonetheless, both enact a sort of exorcism, iteratively building and breaking identities to highlight the intrinsic nature of performance in queer art at large. For this reason, the messier the cast, the better. BULLYACHE’s simulated mess is wretched and shrill – auto-fiction that doesn’t so much celebrate a crashing demise as it does let it rip.

^{Main image: BULLYACHE, WHO HURT YOU? (detail), 2024, Bold Tendencies, performance documentation. Courtesy: © Dan John Lloyd}