Decadence in Cabaret Today

Guest post: Dr Ben Walters  

Fig. 1: Ben Walters delivering a version of this post at the Staging Decadence salon, Rich Mix, London, 21 January 2022. Photo by Emma Jones.

This post’s first airing came in the form of a talk at a salon run by Staging Decadence at Rich Mix in London on 21 January 2022. I then posted it on my blog, NotTelevision.

As a form, salons have historic links to decadence, and I’m writing this post as someone with a longstanding interest in cabaret – another form sometimes thought of as decadent. I’m interested that the roots of both these words – ‘salon’ and ‘cabaret’ – mean ‘room’.

What is it that happens in these rooms? What might be at stake? What kinds of crisis unfold in them? And what future worlds might these rooms model?

Fig. 2: Sadie Sinner performing at the Staging Decadence salon, Rich Mix, London, 21 January 2022. Photo by Emma Jones.

There was a time in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when, for many, ‘decadence’ had quite a powerful negative moral charge. The roots of the word are in ‘decay’, and ‘decadence’ suggested a kind of moral crisis, wilful self- gratification threatening the ruination and collapse of an established collective order. This sense could be wielded conservatively, as a critical warning against change, or subversively, as a badge of defiant radical intent. Sometimes both at once. But either way, the stakes were quite high. Established propriety was on the line.

Decadence came at a cost.

I think in recent decades, that charge has diminished. Rather than suggesting an existential threat to established propriety, ‘decadence’ now, I think, at least in terms of mainstream discourse, tends to evoke a sense of sensuous self-indulgence that fits fairly comfortably within consumer culture. Less a serious threat to established norms, more a relaxation of the rules. So a cream cake might be ‘decadent’, or a bubble bath – or indeed a voyeuristic night out at a cabaret show. ‘A room with a view’, we might say.

By the time I became involved with the cabaret scene as a critic, around 15 years ago, there was already quite a prevalent use of ‘decadence’ as a kind of lure for audiences, often around cheesecake burlesque or Weimar-themed nights. ‘Decadence’ in this setting seemed to suggest sensuality, naughtiness, glamour, risqué performance, and intoxication – a promise, perhaps, of sex and drugs, but more commonly drinking, dancing, and so-called fine dining.

This mode of decadence seems to be a matter of the senses rather than the intellect; where other aesthetic experiences might promise edification, this offers pleasure with a frisson of transgression; overtly radical or political art might be involved, but in practice might only be appreciated for its capacity to titillate.

So, less a rejection of ‘normality’, than a holiday from it. From a certain perspective, this might suggest that decadence has itself decayed as a properly disruptive cultural force. Yet I think it also suggests some interesting things, particularly around how decadence might relate to productivity and pleasure.

If earlier senses of decadence involved the understanding that it came at a cost, can we imagine a kind of decadence related to cabaret that really comes at a cost to established power today? 

Fig. 3: Nando Messias performing at the Staging Decadence salon, Rich Mix, London, 21 January 2022. Photo by Emma Jones.

It might be worth noting some differences here between the older, more paternalistic form of conservatism that held sway when decadence first emerged as a project, and the neoliberal mode that supplanted it from the 1970s onward. The prioritisation of self-determined pleasure and unabashed pursuit of conspicuous largesse went against the grain of the older conservatism’s premium, at least in theory, of structural stability and mutual obligation. But self-determined pleasure and conspicuous largesse are less threatening to an individualist ideology such as neoliberalism, which prizes disruption, competition, and consumption as goods in themselves. Indeed, from the perspective of paternalistic conservatism, neoliberalism, with its programmatic disregard for ethical mutuality, might itself be seen as a form of decadence.

To the extent that neoliberalism holds political, economic, and cultural sway today, however, it could also be vulnerable to decay itself. What mode of decadence, then, might exert a cost on neoliberalism?

It might be useful here to consider the affect of decadence. The word can evoke mixed or even contradictory feelings: the simultaneous experience of surplus and lack; too much and never enough; gorged and famished, or decadence as a crisis of appetite (see, for instance, Johanna Linsley’s post on this blog); a gnawing insatiability; a dissatisfaction with what is available and a yearning for an unknown alternative.

The recent sense of a decadent treat or event – a cake or bubble bath or a titillating show – brings a rather diminished sense of ring-fenced indulgence in an otherwise biddable routine, a little pressure valve. A different affect, I think, is conjured by reference to a decadent person or place. This suggests a different kind of tension, at once entrenched and dissipated, stuck and adrift in the pursuit of some kind of elusive satisfaction or consummation.

Where the decadent moment might suggest clandestine naughtiness, the decadent life might evoke a more radical defiance of propriety and expectation – a wholesale alienation from the now in search of the gratifying new. To be decadent in this way is to be a problem: to be at once dissatisfied and dissatisfying, not taking part and getting in the way, or spoiling it for the others. To be decadent in this way is to be a scandal, failing to meet normative expectations in a compelling, spectacular way.

So if the present terrain of propriety and expectation is claimed by neoliberalism, what kind of decadence might fruitfully reject the now for the new and be a problem and a scandal on today’s terms? If you open the door to a decadent room today, what do you find?

Perhaps this new decadence lies in the embrace not of pleasure per se, but of pleasurable unproductivity, a decoupling of wilful self-gratification from market logics. The really illicit thing might be an insistence on the unprofitable enjoyment of unearned leisure. The promise (much more easily made than delivered) of a life without labour, a radical disidentification with the precarious pursuit of competitive achievement or the delivery of fixed, fungible products.

Decadence as a crisis of productivity.

Or it might be about corroding the fetish of individualism: embracing the potential of achievement without credit, realised through collective and relational efforts in which the how and the why take precedence over the who.

Decadence as a crisis of identity and status. 

Fig. 4: Lucy McCormick performing at the Staging Decadence salon, Rich Mix, London, 21 January 2022. Photo by Emma Jones.

And perhaps cabaret can help here – at least an optimistic sense of the kind of radical, queer, participatory cabaret that I love – because, at its best, it is a form distinctively rooted in collectivity. Cabaret of this kind is a collaboration in the moment between those on and behind the stage and those before it. Cabaret of this kind also has to do with the impossibility of identical reproduction and reliable exploitation of the unpredictably, organically collaborative event.

The lived politics of such shows, and the collective culture that enables them, suggest other ways of being and doing that are simultaneously invested in pleasure and fun, and generative of civic meaning and agency. This is an overlap that has been viscerally denied by neoliberal norms, which find room for pleasure only as the shadow of labour, hollow recompense for profit-driven productivity.

In modelling these other, better ways, perhaps cabaret can expose the palpable inadequacy of available forms of living and the weird knots they tie themselves into by way of insisting that everything is normal and fine and actually what you want and the only imaginable reality – even amid crisis upon crisis upon crisis.

So perhaps we can understand the decadence of cabaret today as a matter of happily helping the decay of things that need to rot if we are to survive: a scandalous game with no losers, played amongst precarious ruins, that feels good, makes nothing you can sell, and rehearses utopia.

Perhaps it offers, as undecadent as it might sound, rooms for improvement.