But to quote a phrase from the text, the spectacle was an always exciting reminder of how, in art and life, "the heartbeat sets the pace".
The rest of us, victims of globalised social exclusion, will – in the manner envisaged by French situationist Guy Debord in his classic 1967 text Society of the Spectacle – be couch-prone voyeurs.
"(And)" is more clearly a dance spectacle with text (spoken and sung) and music (live and taped), and it has some remarkable dancers (notably Julien Faure) who throw themselves fearlessly into the physical extremes and fluid knots of Ms. Barkey's choreography.
The best place to start, and finish, remains Guy Debord's 1967 treatise The Society of the Spectacle, the set text of those mercurial revolutionaries the Situationists.
In his seminal text The Society of the Spectacle, the French provocateur Guy Debord writes that, "in a world that has really been turned upside down, the true is a moment of the false".
The Victorian Era marked the height of the movement which would later be described as "pictorial": based on lavish sets and visual spectacle, heavily cut texts making room for lengthy scene-changes, and elaborate stage effects.
Goldoni thoroughly revised the text, cutting out arias and pointless spectacle.
But it is most of all in its analysis of the ideology of the Spectacle that Debord's text repays close reading.
He raised his demi-lune spectacles to peruse wall text praising him as the hotel's "ingenious decorator, master planner and recipient of France's greatest tribute, the Légion d'honneur".
Reading in a monotone from a large-lettered text that spared him from using spectacles, he avoided any direct reference to the issues of weapons and terrorism that have placed all of Iraq, and the Middle East, on edge.
