Selah’s Cabaret Immersion in the Funk Zone

Disco Elysium is the final movement in Selah Dance Collective’s triptych of works exploring cabaret, modernism, and “the grotesque body” in performance, the new entry colliding, deconstructing and reconfiguring Sound and Smoke and Palermo! Drawing from the first two works’ expressionist shadows and carnivalesque exuberance, the showwill take place not on the traditional stage of the Lobero Theatre or even the black box configuration of Center Stage, but in a transformed warehouse in the Funk Zone that was previously a winery. An event that combines performance, installation, and nightlife adventure, Disco Elysium draws from and fairly culminates Selah founder and choreographer Meredith Ventura’s long-term research into early 20th-century European cabaret and the politics of spectacle, inspired by Weimar-era cabaret and avant-garde nightlife – bringing the archival research to life in an experience meant to be both immersive and excessive. 

“This show is kind of … the collision of a lot of my different ideas, a unity of vision of bringing people up and close and personal to the movement, with elements that are made to be a little provocative, and where people are very aware of themselves in the space as they’re watching the show,” Ventura said. “They’re the two different collage pieces that I have now edited a lot to fit together better.”

Disco Elysium is set up as a series of vignettes – some 20 in each section that range from confrontational, political, and social to humorous and maybe even silly. These coalesce into a whole that evokes an impression rather than a specific narrative, Ventura said. 

“We’re not delivering a series of answers and wrapping up a story. It’s more like I’m asking these questions about how people are reacting to what they’re seeing on stage? What are the ways the character interactions evoke something in you? What is the meaning?”

Some of the inspiration comes from things much more modern than Germany in the 1920s, including SpongeBob and the Mad Men TV series, which Ventura has been watching with her husband.

“Everything for me revolves around dance, the thing that I’ve centered my life on,” she said. “The Mad Men episode with the Kodak Carousel has a very sentimental moment where it’s very heartfelt and it feels a little inspiring about family, but it’s by a character who is constantly cheating on his wife. I use a soundbite to twist the original meaning. I’ve always been interested in satire because it’s not about what they’re saying. It’s about how they say it. That’s what I find to be the most interesting about choreography – sometimes the movement itself doesn’t even matter. It’s the accumulation that makes this thing mean something.”

Hence, the cumulative effect of Disco Elysium, which will likely have very different responses in every member of the audience. 

Meanwhile, Disco Elysium represents the largest company of dancers in Selah’s history, combining the modern dance company with members of Novus, its ballet wing, and dancers Ventura has encountered at UCSB and elsewhere. But the space itself at 202 Anacapa St. at the corner of Yanonali St. holds less than 150 people in the configuration they’re creating that has the stage largely surrounded by the audience. 

So there will be three separate performances: a premiere gala on Friday, May 29, that includes a post-show salon supporting Selah Dance Collective’s upcoming season, and matinee and evening shows on Saturday, May 30, the latter followed by a late-night cabaret party with live DJs, pop-up performances, and dancing. 

More information and general admission tickets and reserved VIP cabaret seating are available at www.selah.dance/disco