Matthew Bourne’s "The Car Man"

(Sadler’s Wells, 24 July 2015)

The ballet opens with an idyllic scene of car mechanics, waitresses, and girls of unknown provenance labouring, lounging, conversing, and copulating on a sizzling Arizona afternoon. The ensuing scenes augment this idyll with violence and murder. The production does well by eschewing the 1940s Hollywood Code; there is more to noir than film noir. The narrative is gritty in places, thereby challenging one to detect beauty in or between the episodes of the tragic or the mundane.

Vitality seduces.

The line between the sensual and the pornographic is fine. This demarcation need not be observed for art to retain its integrity. The dances' eroticism derives from their context, the implied relationships, and playfulness, which deals in uncertainty and suspense. Art layers uncertainty and suspense.

One need not come to possess beauty in order to savour it. Even the contemplation of nature may evoke eroticism. It may suffice to merely know that beauty exists and to be touched by this beauty (to ascertain one's own existence).