From the very beginning, Francesca Santamaria notifies us: keep your phones on, don’t switch them off. Here, it’s good vibes only.
Imagine viral choreography clips from social media flashing one after another. A famous Chinese workout routine, a lip-sync trend designed to thrill Gen Z on TikTok, royalty-free music endlessly recycled in contemporary dance exercises. Santamaria shifts from one aesthetic to another, with impressive physical flexibility and sharp acting skills.
The performance takes another turn, as the audio clips become shorter and shorter. Santamaria is forced to jump rapidly between choreographies, like a dance version of spot the intro. In the middle of the sequences, she catches her breath while a seductive advertising voice freezes the action, urging the audience to stay until the end for a surprise.We won’t spoil it for you. Go discover GOOD VIBES ONLY (beta test) for yourself, a show as addictive as a dopamine hit from your social media feed.
A series of viral dance clips have been uploaded into Francesca Santamaria’s body. On a brightly lit stage, a computerised voice-over commands which one she should execute next. A Hip Mobility Challenge, the Wednesday Addams choreo, a Jason Derulo dance – each one is performed with cyborg-like precision. The voice contextualises the dances, making GOOD VIBES ONLY (beta test) initially feel like a dance history class for our TikTok-littered times.
Yet the power of Santamaria’s performance lies in its eerie absence of feeling. Her sole function, like any good robot, is to entertain. The show intentionally displays no depth, and that’s what makes it so disturbing. It’s a trial version – the audience will be asked to pay more for the full performance (no spoilers as to how).
With culture budgets being slashed the world over, Santamaria cleverly offers a cynical answer for dancers still hoping to make a living from their art: go start an OnlyFans.
Francesca Santamaria enters to short bursts of music resembling social media reels. Her appearance is deliberately generic: jeans, white T-shirt, long brown hair, natural make-up – without a defined individual identity. Through ChatGPT prompts, Santamaria assembles a mix of references from social media, raising questions about who selects, filters, and legitimises the endless flow of online content we encounter.
GOOD VIBES ONLY (beta test) unfolds as an algorithmic stream, treating ‘positivity’ as a repeatable online formula rather than a lived emotional state. The movement is deliberately flat and impersonal, exposing how interchangeable and emptied-out these forms of entertainment become once removed from the screen context.
Interruptions announce that the free trailer will soon expire, prompting Santamaria to lift her T-shirt, revealing a QR code printed on her vest, which we’re invited to scan. By culminating in a ‘buy me a coffee’ page, the performance successfully expands beyond the stage, sharply blurring theatre, marketing, and digital consumption.
It’s hard to quantify the strange alchemy that transforms a humble post into a viral video. Something touches the zeitgeist, enters the public consciousness, and away it goes. Whether that creates a sense of community, or a population of conformist sheep, is up for debate.
In GOOD VIBES ONLY (beta test), Italian dancer and choreographer Francesca Santamaria extracts some of TikTok’s biggest hitters and fuses them together. So we find Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday Addams routine, the Doja Cat hip mobility challenge, Jason Derulo’s Savage Love dance, and many more, all performed on repeat.
Santamaria is a hugely versatile dancer, and endlessly watchable, so whether she’s folding her body into a groove, or replicating graceful balletic moves from Staatsballett Berlin’s surprise 2021 video hit, we can’t take our eyes off her. Yet there is something dispassionate, almost AI-esque about her delivery, the disembodied voiceover, and talk of downloads and remuneration. We leave feeling entertained, but filled with questions about the interface where dance and technology meet.