Is The Cortège The Future Of Entertainment Or Just Instagram Bait?

Out on the cricket fields at The Los Angeles Equestrian Center, an experiential open-air event is bringing together dance, sound, light, puppetry, costume, myth, and robotic canines. The show is called The Cortège and now that you’ve glimpsed that word, don’t be surprised when it stalks you across your feeds all week.

The Cortège bills itself as a revival of the lost art of pageantry and a “festive funeral for our times.” Yet like mortality itself, with its serpentine tangle of feelings and contradictions, this three-hour odyssey summons responses ranging from the genuinely transcendent to the deeply confounded, from the wowing to the just plain “nope.”

And so, I invite you to enjoy these multiple perspectives on a journey of drum and drone, of crawling creeps and krumpers, and of slack-jawed wonder at the sight of shaggy wraiths and gargantuans taking the field like escaped car wash brushes.

Perspective #1: The Cortège is an otherworldly spectacular unlike anything Los Angeles has seen.

With towering hirsute puppets (visualize the love children of Yo Gabba Gabba and Big Foot) and ornately costumed musicians and dancers, The Cortège delivers a one-of-a-kind all-in spectacle that its creator Jeff Hull, an Oakland artist and producer known for his streetwear line Oaklandish, calls “shadow work” on a cultural scale.

The audience gathers at twilight, sitting on the grass or on raised chairs, and a live six-piece band begins with an overture of mournful, contemplative music. A lone silent figure appears, crawling and then standing and then dancing at the center of the field. He stays there through much of the performance, like an anchor or witness, while the “life” of the show plays out around him.

What follows is a surreal, non-linear passage through the stages of life and death. Costumed characters move in dreamlike sequences. Drones light up the Burbank sky. Robotic dogs and militant imagery stand in for violence and human invention turned destructive. There are visual references to refugees, immigrants, medieval morality plays, New Orleans funerals.

The crowd takes it all in wearing headphones with green lights, turning the night into a kind of silent disco in a scene straight out of Mad Max. The final act invites the audience to step into the procession to dance and eventually share in a tea reception, a symbolic “afterlife” party held in an an adjoining tent.

Perspective #2: The Cortège is a confusing, occasionally cringe jumble of a show that’s literally all over the map.

For all its grand ambitions and notable budget, The Cortège often feels like a fabulous Pinterest board come to life rather than a coherent performance. Scenes don’t so much unfold as collide. Moments of romantic play give way to flashes of authoritarian force, broken up by thumping EDM.

The production stitches together a grab-bag of ‘global’ references—Caribbean steel drums, Mardi Gras second lines, LA street dance—without ever rooting itself in a specific tradition. Are we in a Bedouin caravan, an African ritual, a Greek amphitheater (clue: baklava is the lone sweet at the pricey snack stand).

Some directorial choices feel curiously off-key: Why entrust the ritual cleansing of the space to what appears to be a crew member when a dozen costumed shamans stand at the ready nearby? And was it necessary for the evening’s sole spoken passage to catalog dead celebs, including Loni Anderson and Val Kilmer?

Meanwhile, the headphones, meant to unify the audience in a shared soundscape, instead isolate viewers into their glowing silos, which feels like an ironic choice for a show supposedly about communal grief.

The result is less a rite of passage than a series of disconnected tableaux, dazzling in flashes but never adding up to anything deeper. What could have been a transformative meditation on mourning too often slips into surface-level spectacle, leaving the audience to piece together meaning from a scattershot collage of influences.

Perspective #3: The Cortège is the future of experiential entertainment—so let’s get it right.

Like it or not, Instagram and TikTok are reshaping how we experience entertainment even in airplane mode. From immersive Van Gogh exhibitions and Secret Cinema to the recently remounted The Willows here in Los Angeles, we flock to these events claiming we want to escape our phones. Yet these productions are increasingly designed around an ethos of visual-over-depth that compels us to immediately document and post each scene. We experience the show through our cameras (I did it, too), tag our friends, and anyone who glimpses our stories gets caught in the algorithm, as you now will be with The Cortège.

So while it’s wonderful to venture out into the San Fernando Valley night and gather with strangers, I find myself longing for something that truly raises goosebumps and pulls me so completely into a gripping narrative I forget to perform my own spectatorship. The Cortège often feels like a beautiful but diluted version of experiences that Cirque du Soleil and Burning Man execute with more conviction and coherence. Maybe you’ll feel differently; The Los Angeles Times loved it, but still.

The best entertainment does more than get you to go, “whoa.” It makes you forget we have phones to check, stories to post, feeds to curate. It reminds us what it feels like to be genuinely moved rather than momentarily tickled. The Cortège gestures toward that transcendence, but too often settles for the kind of veiled enchantment that follows us home through our screens.

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