Extreme Surreality
Tags: photos, Sibiu, Romania, concert, festival
Date: 31 May 2007 12:24:45
I thought I'd post some pictures of some of the culture I've seen this past week as part of the Theatre Festival. Most of it was rather normal, but the event I saw last night was the one of the bizarrest things I've ever seen.
First up, also bizarre, is the random hairdressing I happened upon in Piata Mica the other day. The hairdressers, as you can see, were dressed and made up, with kimonos made out of bubble wrap (well, of course!).
I already mentioned Shekatak, from Israel, the dance group that were like Stomp! As I was watching them I was thinking about how I would describe them, and had come up with "Like Stomp! but without the pots and pans". Except as you can see from the second photo, the pots and pans eventually made an appearance too. (They also did that thing where the main guy got the audience clapping particular rhythms and then suddenly made it really complicated so everybody laughed. Stomp! do that too). I should say though, even though they were a bit of a Stomp! copy, they were also very good indeed and I did enjoy this show a lot.
Next up is a picture of the Bach concert mentioned previously, and three pictures of the flamenco I saw in the early evening yesterday (as an aside, girlinthegarret, the flamenco singer was a dead ringer for Sergio from madchurch). I love flamenco, and remember when I went to Madrid a couple of years back with a couple of friends we wandered into a random bar and found a flamenco show on, just a guy on guitar and two girls dancing (one of whom also sang too) and it was just amazing - really earthy and raw and sexy and incredible. This didn't quite capture that (probably because it was a big open-air thing rather than a dark smoky bar) but was still fantastic.
And then, on to the main event. I only found out about this by accident, but there was an outdoor theatre event on in Piata Mica which was being televised, and which (I think) was a collaboration between German and Romanian actors. Throughout the entire thing I had an overwhelming sense of having no idea what was going on (I think most of the audience did, to be honest) - it started off with historical-type figures, followed by people on stilts with gasmasks, coming into the square, and the stage itself reminded me of War of the Worlds. There were zombies. There was a woman in red pants descending from the "eye" of the spaceship-thingy with a bottle of Coke that everyone got in a frenzy trying to get hold of. Just as I was starting to think that maybe it was an allegory of the promise and hope of capitalism followed by the corrupting reality, two dancers attached by ropes at the chest made a giant cat's cradle, then there were more zombies, then a woman got hauled up to the "eye" in a plastic bag which filled with water and then she burst from it in a rather obvious birth metaphor moment, and I decided that actually I really didn't have a clue what it was about after all. I left shortly after this, but as I was crossing Podul Minciunilor (Liar's Bridge) I looked back and I'm glad I did, as by this point an angel with fiery wings had appeared and then there were some sparkly firework thingies from the legs of the spaceship. I saw someone I knew there, we were both puzzling about what it might mean, and the only thing we agreed on was that the choreographer had probably been on drugs. If anybody randomly reading this was there last night and has any idea at all what it was about, please do leave a comment, I'd love to know!
