Disco Elysium is the final movement in Selah Dance Collective’s triptych exploring cabaret, modernism, and the grotesque body in performance. Following Sound and Smoke (the tragedy) and Palermo! (the comedy), this new work arrives as a culminating collision, an ecstatic reckoning of satire, seduction, and dissolution.

Drawing from the expressionist shadows of Sound and Smoke and the carnivalesque exuberance of Palermo!, Disco Elysium conjures a world at once decadent and decayed. The dancers inhabit a liminal space – half dance hall, half ruin – where grotesque bodies flicker between ecstasy and exhaustion, collapse and resurrection. In its glittering surfaces and subterranean pulse, the piece stages cabaret not as aftermath, but as afterlife: a dance of persistence in the ruins, where the tragicomic becomes luminous, even transcendent.

As the final iteration, Disco Elysium does not resolve but combusts – folding together tragedy and comedy, irony and sincerity, the historical and the urgent present. What emerges is an immersive choreography of survival and desire: the dance of bodies refusing disappearance, shimmering defiantly against the inevitable.