Well, if the expectation was for risk-taking and things which can't really be done in performance, Day 1 delivered.
Occupying Day 1 and leading the
program was the residents of Faki, who presented the culmination of the previous
month’s work. Knowing the way the audience works in the festival, it doesn’t take long
for a bomb to drop – and perhaps the
first was dropped for the evening by Sura Hertzberg with her autobiographical
ritual about heroin addiction, an energy quickly followed up on by the fantastically trivial Nordified and the theatre experiment Talk to Me and I’ll Slap You.
First a disclaimer:
it’s hard to adequately view five shows in one evening, let alone write on
them. Today’s casualty was Collective B’s (AT)
Spectaculat’or – a quirky physicality of togetherness and separation, which
fulfilled the ‘someone has to break a window’ requirement of Faki. Adding further difficulty: the harsh halls of Medika seem to bring out a kind of violent strength in the
ontology of the works, making the jump from one to the other even more
difficult, as though moving between totally different worlds. As in the following days, almost everything is prefaced by an apology: I did my best.
Soft Associations
Soft Associations declares itself as an exploration into the
‘softness’ of the body, and it’s pretty much as it says on the label. The
audience enters into a space of soft, warm, light and gentle smoke, the dulcet,
albeit masculine tones of Sinatra belting out I’ve Got You Under my Skin, the two performers (Liv Fauver and Kata
Cots) gently splayed naked on the floor. What follows is a meditation on ‘softness’
and the (particularly female) body, Nina Simone cutting against the opening Sinatra
as a musical presence, sometimes ironically silenced, herself reduced to a projected image.
The performers adopt an awkward, anguished movement that is almost
struggling against its own display, achieving a kind of liberty against Simone’s
Chauffeur, only for it to be suddenly
ripped away by repetitive and reluctant exposure and concealment, reminiscent
of conventions of (male) erotic pleasure.
