Billy Bultheel and James Richards Navigate the Aftermath of History

‘Dear Polly, I did something rash (I know) and accepted an invitation to holiday (I know) in Ibiza.’ Delivered between two screens strobing hallucinogenic, the wry lines from Ian White’s lecture performance IBIZA: A Reading for ‘The Flicker’ (2008) set the tone for much of what’s to come in composer Billy Bultheel and video artist James Richards’s multimedia extravaganza, Workers in Song (2023). Over the next 100 minutes, five live musicians and two larger-than-life projections take the audience through a bleak sex vacation and even bleaker dating profiles; renditions of ‘Der Leiermann’ from Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey, 1828) as a cruising encounter; lots of holes and voids in poems by Rae Armantrout, Liesl Lindeque and Stuart Marshall; close-ups of preppy young men shooting up amphetamines; romantic string and flute interludes; barren brutalist interiors and nocturnal landscapes; breathy recitations alternating with skull-rattling drums; even a pop song or two – and the list could easily continue. 

In keeping with the Winterreise, this grab bag of material is welded together by the conceit of the journey. After several citational passages, the performance gradually descends into a parallel universe of original footage and music. Meanwhile, the interpreters map out the darkened space with flashlights and strobes, occasionally dazzling viewers as if caught in a searchlight. These lights are echoed by footage redolent of The Blair Witch Project (1999) that expands the performance into a succession of desolate landscapes, growing ever-more disorienting with time. The effect is partly due to the use of 360-degree camera footage, which occasionally gives the stilted feeling of navigating the performance through Google Street View. At one point, the landscape warps into a flashing, throbbing vortex that resembles nothing so much as a psychedelic sphincter or, perhaps, a K-hole.

Despite the lack of narrative, the world-building here is deep. As things progress, the episodes sediment into a spectral portrait of gay male life at the outset of the 21st century. We find ourselves in a dystopia of disenchanted desires and endless searching – though for what, no one can say. Sidestepping tropes of trauma and community, the subjectivity here comes from a time when gay men have ceased to resemble anything like an inherently progressive political class – if, indeed, we ever did – a turn that historian Ben Miller dubbed the ‘death of modern homosexuality’ in a 2021 article for The Baffler. Unmoored from the solidarity that collective oppression imposed, we’re left to sort out our conflicting desires in the privacy of our own heads. Meanwhile the public options on offer increasingly tend toward second-rate assimilation into heterosexual patterns of accumulation and reproduction or solipsistically chemsexing your brains until you no longer care. And, if it weren’t clear by now, this piece is a lot about the latter. 

The gay man of Workers in Song is a lone romantic navigating the aftermath of this history. Though no longer cast out by the world, he has yet to find his place in it and maybe never will. Here, the music’s irregular rhythms and indefinitely deferred climaxes foreclose any catharsis. Our wanderer’s isolation thus figures less as a challenge to be overcome and more as an enduring condition. As the lights go on at the end, the baritone Alexey Kokhanov settles down at the piano and belts out: ‘At last I am free. I can hardly see in front of me. I can hardly see in front of me …’ In context, these lines from Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers’s ode to disillusionment, ‘At Last I Am Free’ (1978), resonate with a bittersweet avowal of escaping the past without necessarily having any vision of the future. And maybe that’s just the way things go: freedom rarely ends up looking like we thought it would. 

^{Main image: Billy Bultheel and James Richards, Workers in Song, 2023, performance documentation, WIELS, Brussels. Courtesy: the artists; photograph: Tine Declerck}