Video: Lady Gaga is Owning the Darkness in the Mayhem Ball'
Briefly

Video: Lady Gaga is Owning the Darkness in the Mayhem Ball'
"The best live musicians figure out a the best sort of spectacle-oriented musicians, Madonna being among them, figure out a way to incorporate the new material with the old material and have them all be of a piece. Beyonce has figured that out. Yes. I feel like the surprise of this show I mean, I knew she had that in her. The musicianship is clear."
"But the, the satisfaction of hearing something like Paparazzi be reinvented as a funeral dirge, right? And it just deepens what already felt like a creepy and deep song, in a way. Now it means a completely different thing to see her doing this, I mean, I'm calling it a funeral dirge because that's the musical style that it, it's been rearranged into. But, I mean, it's kind of a wedding march the way she does it."
"There's a lot of lurching and limping and twitching in the show. All the themes are coming together. Yes. Being looked at. Being watched? Yes. Like, her interest in darkness. I mean, again, this is a show about death. It is a show about surviving death. It is a show about being brought back from the dead. It is a show about wrestling in death for more life. It's a show about being killed, being envied to death."
The Mayhem Ball tour reframes pop spectacle through mortuary and theatrical imagery, blending choreography, costume, and staging. Songs are rearranged to alter emotional meaning, exemplified by Paparazzi transformed into a funeral dirge and a wedding-march hybrid. Physical fragility—crutches, lurching, limping, twitching—becomes part of the narrative of death, survival, and rebirth. Visuals and movement create a cemeterial atmosphere while dance serves as resistance to death. The performance integrates new and old material into a cohesive whole, using reinvention and theatricality to deepen familiar songs and amplify themes of being watched and envied.
Read at www.nytimes.com
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