MK Ultra review Rosie Kay, Adam Curtis and the Illuminati

Laban theatre, London; and touring
The choreographer and the film-maker delve into the supposed New World Order in a wildly ambitious new work

For decades, the CIA and the Walt Disney corporation have been brainwashing child stars such as Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber, programming them to spread subliminal messages in support of a shadowy New World Order. The affairs of the world are controlled not by governments but by a centuries-old occult order known as the Illuminati.

Bizarre though they sound, these beliefs are increasingly widespread, especially among young people for whom the pronouncements of authority figures no longer ring true. The internet is awash with such theories. The choreographer Rosie Kay and film-maker Adam Curtis had both been investigating this field for some years when, in 2016, they agreed to collaborate on a dance work. And here I must declare an interest, because I introduced them to each other.

MK Ultra, the resultant creation, takes its name from the (real) CIA mind-control programme of the 1960s, and it’s a kaleidoscopically peculiar creation. Curtis has created a film, voiced by himself, in which arcane and cabbalistic imagery is intercut with pop culture footage. This plays on a triangular screen (the triangle is a symbol of the Illuminati) as Kay’s seven dancers perform to Annie Mahtani’s electronic score.

Kay’s choreography takes the mechanically sexualised vocabulary of the pop video, with its buttocky writhings and dead-eyed crotch grabbing, and reconfigures it as hieratic ritual. Enigmatic solos alternate with cryptic, geometric tableaux. Shelley Eva Haden is the central figure, at once immortal fantasy heroine and cult priestess. The dances unfold in a blizzard of referential imagery. Triangles, pyramids, butterflies, thrones, chequered floors: all are symbols of the Illuminati, and according to Kay and Curtis, such images are liberally seeded into pop videos by producers aware of their young viewers’ predilections.

Kay’s mysterious choreography and Curtis’s jarring images combine with Mahtani’s manipulated samples to unsettling and often baffling effect. MK Ultra’s creators calculatedly overload us. What’s unexpected is that the result is less sinister and troubling than playful. Kay and Curtis offer us a postmodern fantasia that can be accessed by a young audience who are fully aware of its fundamental implausibility, but who, alienated by the pronouncements of the political, cultural and religious establishment, wish to play their own fantastical games with the truth.

Cracks appear from time to time. The piece could be shorter and tighter, and there are moments when the choreography gets lost in the thing it’s exploring. Simulated masturbation doesn’t become something else by being recontextualised. But MK Ultra asks important questions about the real and the fake, and whether, for a new generation, they’ve become one.

MK Ultra tours the UK until 18 May

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