Undead Performance Art Show Sparks Controversy: “They’re Zombies, Not Puppets”

By Bulletin Staff

A performance art show involving the undead posed as if taking part in a music and dance demonstration has prompted protests by zombie rights groups who believe that using the living dead as entertainment is inhumane.

The New York-based artist Jacques Frere opened the show, titled “Dead Do Dance,” at the off-Broadway Palaceum Theater in Manhattan in September to generally positive reviews.

The show involves a “cast” of the undead who are controlled by ropes and wires like marionettes to move as if they are dancing, twerking or playing musical instruments, while a live orchestra performs the actual show music, a mix of popular show tunes from recent Broadway hits.

In her review of the performance, Emily St. Johns, theater critic with the Times, wrote that “Frere’s work expresses the vacuous, soulless nature of so much modern theater and reflects his stated view that much of what passes as ‘entertainment’ today should be stabbed in the brain with a sharp conductor’s baton.”

A less positive review, from Franklin De Puis with the Journal, took issue with the mechanics of the cast’s movements and called the show “a nightmare of poorly executed animatronics that says more about its director’s own lack of vision than the state of Broadway today.”

According to reporting in the Post, the show’s box office was poor through its first several weeks until a protest organized by the New York-based Living Dead Rights Campaign garnered widespread media attention when the protestors broke into the show during a performance and attempted to release several of the zombie cast members from their wire controls.

While no cast members were ultimately released, three of the protestors were themselves bitten during the action, quickly turning and attacking confused audience members who thought that the protest was part of the show.

In the end, members of New York’s Rapid Undead Containment Unit had to put down the three zombified protestors and five audience members bitten and turned by the living dead protestors. A spokesperson for the LDRC said that protesters had not intended to get anyone killed but rather had only wanted to “draw attention to the cruelty of the show and get it shut down.”

The spokesperson, who declined to give her name, admitted that no one from the group had actually seen the show. She added that the protest had largely been prompted by news coverage stemming from the Daryl Dixon documentary released in September that showed a performance of a French zombie orchestra.

“Everyone in our group was really outraged by what we saw in the Dixon film, and when we learned about Frere’s show here in New York, we immediately started organizing the protest to try to shut it down,” she said.

However, the botched protest appeared to have the opposite of its intended effect. In the wake of extensive news coverage, the show sold out all remaining performances through the end of the year, and Frere announced that the theater would extend showings into at least the first quarter of 2024 rather than closing after the Christmas holiday.

On the other hand, LDRC’s action also sparked a broader discussion of the appropriateness of using the undead as part of this kind of performance art. In an editorial in the Times, Jack Sisko, director of the Washington-based Zombie Rights Coalition, decried what he called “the exploitation of the living dead for the entertainment of the living.”

The show, Sisko wrote, “diminishes our own humanity by making us complicit in the degrading treatment of these once living, thinking and feeling beings. They’re zombies, not puppets.”

For his part, Frere pushed back on the assertion that his cast were forced to perform against their will. “First of all,” he said, “they are undead, and they have no will. All they have is a ravenous hunger to eat the flesh and brains of the living.

“Second, all the cast were actors in their living life, and we sought out consent from the cast members’ immediate family to use their zombified dearly departed in the show as a way for them to continue their passion for the stage even after they had joined the living dead.”

Moreover, Frere said, most of the cast had come from small regional theaters, and none of them had performed so close to Broadway in the past. “This is the biggest show they have ever been a part of. I’ve made stars of them all. Zombie stars, but stars nevertheless,” he concluded.

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