Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

A giant staircase bordered by flickering lights runs from the upper part of the stage all the way into the audience. Welcome to the world of showbiz, a world full of wonderful people, people who are always in character and neverf make mistakes, and who seem to find one another in a perfect marriage of dance and music. Nothing intimidates them and they know no shame.

Humour knows no shame. A good joke only really becomes good when it is told without any inhibition. That, however, only works if the joke is told in the right situation—tell it at a bad time and the situation becomes embarrassing. That’s why humour makes us highly aware of our social environment. We only appreciate good jokes when we’re in a familiar environment. The theatre is one of those.

In ‘It’s not funny’, Meg Stuart takes away the audience’s familiarity with the theatre and the world of showbiz. The dancers are like rockets; the jokes that are told on stage are either incomprehensible or inappropriate. Like this, Meg Stuart constantly confronts the audience with the question whether the world on stage is actually their own. After all, no matter how theatrical the dancers may seem, their moves always have a sense of truth in them.