Rather than recognizing the sudden outbursts of joy outside Madison Square Garden as a triumph of the human spirit, leading critics have been forced to note that the ecstatic gyrations are little more than a pale, unstudied pastiche entirely lacking in dramaturgical rigor.
The sudden, unprompted undulations of the local populace outside sports bars and subway entrances—prompted, one gathers, by the successful traversal of a leather sphere through a metal hoop during a recent basketball exhibition—have been widely and erroneously celebrated by the lay public as a catalyst for untainted happiness; in reality, these crude somatic spasms reveal a metropolis entirely unmoored from the structural disciplines of the choreographic avant-garde, choosing instead to wallow in the cheapest forms of physical expression.
Observing these street-level celebrations, one is immediately forced to recall the spatial tyranny of Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, though the Knicks fans' insistence on chest-bumping strangers owes far less to canonical French surrealism than it does, tragically, to the choreographic despair of Tatsumi Hijikata's Ankoku Butoh; it is a profound aesthetic failure that these supposedly spontaneous outbursts borrow so heavily from both of these rich traditions only to dilute them with the kinetic banality of a 1998 Gap commercial, seamlessly fusing the disparate elements into an agonizing, uncurated tableau of middlebrow joy.
It is frankly insulting that these residents believe their untainted happiness excuses such a complete lack of kinesthetic self-awareness, especially when they are utilizing the public square.
The true tragedy, of course, is not merely that the New York Knicks have won a sporting contest, but that their victories have authorized a sprawling, unchoreographed bacchanal that entirely ignores the foundational texts of modern movement; one can only hope that, should the franchise advance to the next round of their athletic tournament, the ensuing jubilation might at least incorporate a passing nod to the somber, existential stillness of a Tarkovsky tracking shot, rather than devolving once more into a joyous, aggressively pedestrian horror.