Killer Choreography

At long last, from that most graceful of art forms, a dance inspired by Death Race 2000!

Yes, that Death Race 2000 (as if there could be more than one), the twisted, tacky, tasteless, sleazy, exploitative, cartoonishly violent, outrageously entertaining, cheap, cheap, cheap 1975 cult film in which a post-Kung Fu David Carradine, a pre-Rocky Sly Stallone, and Warhol Factory alumna Mary Woronov race each other coast-to-coast, racking up points by mowing down pedestrians. A product of the stable of B-movie emperor Roger Corman, the film was cranked out as disposable drive-in fare, but it caught on with a certain crowd that relished the black humor and over-the-top mayhem that the film wallowed in, even as it criticized America’s fascination with violence, especially in sports. Rollerball, which came out the same year, was Hollywood’s high-minded take on the same subject, but Death Race 2000 is the one that people remember – and the one that still gets screened three decades later.

In fact, it was a revival screening at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema last year that got Austin choreographer Ellen Bartel thinking about the film. An ad for the screening caught her eye: It showed a man in the street down on one knee looking over at a dark and menacing race car that you could tell was seconds away from turning him into so much roadkill. “I was so intrigued by that photo,” says Bartel. “It’s funny, my dad is a car driver, and I have a certain affinity for race cars, and I just love this picture of this guy struggling to get up while this car …” Her voice trails off, but it’s clear where her comment was going: is ready to run him down, flatten him, kill him.

Bartel had in mind that she wanted “to do some satirical thing about killing and how it’s all over the place, and we blow it off like it’s entertainment.” She was thinking along the lines of The Running Man, that late-Eighties Stephen King vehicle for Ah-nult, but a rental re-viewing of Death Race, which she’d seen in high school but didn’t remember well, proved the big inspiration. The tone, the dialogue, even the sounds provided a foundation for the dance she wanted to make. And hey, Death Race 2000 was directed by Paul Bartel. No relation, but possibly a sign that this was a project she was meant to do.

Bartel the choreographer started KillSport, as she calls her dance, by having her composer, Andy Hadaway, record the audio of the entire movie onto a CD. “So I actually sat and listened to the whole movie,” she says, broken into something like 47 tracks. “And I picked out certain cues and little excerpts from the movie – the stupidest things someone could say, like, ‘You love me because I kill people’ – and we inserted it into the soundtrack to the dance.”

Bartel wasn’t looking to adapt the movie into movement, so you won’t see a black-helmeted analog to Mr. Carradine’s Frankenstein doing grand jettes as he symbolically runs down another unfortunate slowpoke in a crosswalk. The soundtrack belongs to the movie, and she uses its dramatic progression to help tell the story, but she’s developed her own narrative of a community in which violence runs amok. “We start out as humble, sweet little animals, and we have this really cute society, and we all love each other,” Bartel relates. “And we play with these little toy mice, and we kill the mice, but it’s cute. We have Death Race noises going on through that – people screaming, bombs going off as we’re killing the mice. The idea is that we gradually turn against each other, and we gradually turn more human.” When nobody wants to play with Bartel’s character anymore, she takes it out on a stuffed animal, putting a little noose around its neck and hanging it. And that act turns her from cute, loving woodland creature into a human. So it goes with the other characters, pushed by intolerance and frustration into progressively aggressive behavior, promulgating more cruelty toward stuffed animals, until, says Bartel, “our society breaks apart. We go through a bloody fight, which is humorous – it’s gratuitous and we squirt blood all over the place. And at the end it’s kind of poignant, sort of like what did we do to our perfect world? We ruined it.”

The choreographer won’t deny that she’s talking about the current political scene here. “It’s a little commentary on the war,” she allows, though that isn’t her main focus. “The biggest thing I’m trying to bring up about the war is this confusing thing about: Are we protecting people, or are we killing people? Which one are we doing? Are we just saving the people that we don’t kill? Is it that those are the good people and all the people who happened to die were just stupid?” The party line on Iraq seems to justify or ignore a lot of violence toward innocents, but Bartel adds that the culture of violence she’s satirizing goes beyond the political stage to encompass sports, film, TV, video games, media coverage, and more.

The fact that she has a point to make made it considerably easier for Bartel to sell dancers on all this spurting of fake blood and brutalizing of stuffed bunnies. “They were like, ‘Ohhhh, okay.’ It’s not just Ellen trying to do something gross or creepy or different. There’s an idea behind it. And one of the dancers brought it to my attention that the fact that it’s stuffed animals symbolizes the loss of innocence. It does, and I think that’s part of it, too, part of what we’re going through as a nation.”

Still, all that seriousness is under the surface. As presented, the violence goes so far as to be comical. “We have yet to do it without laughing,” Bartel says, “so that’s going to be a challenge. Everybody’s having fun and being very playful in the process. What’s been fun is the fight scene. I’ve never wrestled in rehearsal before, and when we squirt the blood – which is really blood body paint – the squirt is working good. It’s shooting really far, all over the ceiling. But so much of the show happens so fast, one of the things I’ve got to work on is making sure that you can really see it.”

Yeah, you never want to miss that spurt of blood.

This article appears in March 18 • 2005.