Return To Graz

28. 9. 2013 // // Kategorie Randnotizen 2013

It’s about 17 years since I was last in Graz for the Steirischer Herbst Festival. On my return the sky was grey, the weather cold and damp, and the town looked less prosperous than when I last visited. Maybe it’s just the gloom but I don’t recall seeing empty shop units last time I was here.

The first performance I caught was Gym Club choreographed by Massimo Furlan. It’s based on his interest in local figure Arnold Schwarzenegger, a bodybuilder turned Hollywood movie star and more recently a right-wing politician in the USA. In the theatre I thought I’d gone back to the seventies, which was presumably Furlan’s intention.  A half-hour series of comic group exercises constituted half the piece and they reminded me of Carry On films and the Benny Hill TV Show of that era – but rather than taking up a minute or two of screen time, the joke was repeated until you couldn’t stand it any more.

Various exercises were parodied, including Pilates moves like leg extensions which were performed atrociously. Instead of staying in a box like position on all fours, engaging the core and placing the spine in a neutral position before extending the leg without moving anything else, a performer had his back pushed down by a helper while allowing his hips to sway about.  This completely defeated the object of the exercise, if it was intended as exercise rather than a laugh riot.

There were also fleeting and deliberately pathetic attempts a yoga positions like crow, but at its core this section was based on female aerobics classes of the seventies all done very badly for comic effect by four male and two female dancers. One of the female dancers acted as exercise instructor, and one of the males was really fat to add even more extreme craziness to this piece of physical comedy. All the exercise moves were so pitifully and incorrectly performed that they clearly wouldn’t have done much to raise the heart rate or tone the muscles.  There were even pulsing stretches, something that sports scientists today would advise against, even if they were popular a few decades ago.

Having witnessed the dancers perform mostly exercise designed to tone and slim female bodies (if they had been executed correctly), the four males abruptly and absurdly took to throwing body builder poses. Finally a couple of the dancers used costumes to act out a fantasy of having gained huge muscles. Logically the piece made no sense at all, but then humour isn’t logical and nor is dance.

Later I went to see Marzo by the Italian dance collective Dewey Dell. In this a bunch of freaks in outrageous costumes act out an unintelligible psychodrama. The sound was great and the original music Back Fanfare by Demetrio Castellucci sounded at time like breakbeat – and it was played at reasonable volume through a good speaker system.  Since breakbeat gives me wood, I enjoyed Marzo even more than Gym Club! My only regret of the day was that I arrived in town too late to make it out of the city again to catch The Forest Project by United Sorry!