Here Lies Love – 02 September 2023

Here Lies Love, by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim is a fast paced, immersive experience that transcends the deceptively simple disco ball and dance floor on the marketing material. Criticisms from disgruntled audience members focus on the uncomfortable nature of being directed to move about the space, not being able to bring your bags in, worrying about being separated from the people you came with, and staging choices that are not ideal for the people on the floor. It seems many are not picking up on the fact that these nuances are, in fact, deliberate.

The dance floor and the people upon it are paying the highest prices in the theatre, but are losing the agency they expected to have on a dance floor. Their experiences are mirroring the oppression of the Filipino populace displayed in the show. High price tickets buy them second class treatment; the politicians sing with their backs to their metaphorical constituents, focusing only on the mezzanine; ironically, these elevated audience members have the lowest price tickets, just as higher class people often don’t have to face consequences for their lower risk choices.

All of the glitz and glamor, the media stunts, the screens dictating where the audience should be looking reflected the deep truth that once leaders are elected, the populace often stops paying attention to what is happening in government. When the bomb dropped, literally and figuratively in this case, the experience changed. It was immersive in a completely different way. People on the dance floor did not know what was happening to them—this reflected the manipulation of the Filipino government dropping a bomb on the Liberals so that they could swoop in and save the day in a crisis of their own creating. The audience felt fear created by the production so the production could bring them out of it safely.

So many elements of this show were metatheatrical misunderstandings, and not, in fact, poor producers’ planning. The most valid criticism I have encountered of this show is spending such a long time on Imelda’s origins and not enough time emphasizing the atrocities she and the Marcos family committed in office. To me, this felt like a concession to make the experience enjoyable enough to draw an audience. Many of the audience members, both Filipino and non-Filipino, were looking at the historical information in the lobby, asking each other questions about what really happened, and actively seeking out information on Filipino history after the experience. The greatest gift that art like this can give is being vague enough that people have to look at real, non-stylized, non-dramatized information because the art started a conversation that requires real sources to satisfy the intellectual and emotional curiosity that audience members walked away with.

Many felt that Here Lies Love should have ended with the acoustic song of the People Power Revolution. However, the saddest, scariest element of this production is that, directly mirroring real life, it ends just as it began—using glitz and glamor to obscure a message, to obscure anything that might have been learned—to make oppression seem fun. In reality, history is cyclical. The Marcos family is back in power, and it is both profound and intensely disturbing to realize that we are here dancing about it, clapping along, pretending all that matters is love.

I attended this performance on a free ticket from Show-Score.