Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.06.2009, Side 41

Art | Dance
Stunning, Powerful, Arousing.
Humanimal
I’m not entirely sure what I just witnessed, but I am sure that
it was incredible, beautiful, powerful. Set against a backdrop
of miscellaneous articles of clothing, arranged along the
colour spectrum – blue, green, yellow, cream, beige, brown,
purple – six masses of lycra, cotton and knit wool began to
move. Fluidly, they expanded and condensed, rose up on hu-
man legs and sunk back down to the black stage, morphed
and grew limbs, united, fornicated and separated. This con-
tinued, the movement and growth, until six performers in
white shirts stood before the audience, wide-eyed like chil-
dren thrust into the epicentre of a strange new world.
One of the two male performers broke the silence, stut-
tering at first as he found his voice and came into his own.
Judging by the audience’s reaction it was an entertaining and
amusing monologue – as was the rest of the spoken dialogue
throughout the performance – but neither myself nor my
companion understand a word of Icelandic so we were left to
appreciate the visuals, the movement, the paralinguistic sto-
ry being told. Linguistic comprehension would surely have
augmented our appreciation of the scenes playing out before
us, but the sheer enjoyment we gleaned from the physicality
of the performance is a testament to the calibre of theatrics
we were privy to.
Humanimal transcended language barriers through a de-
piction of raw, animalistic emotional concepts that oft find
themselves stif led in daily human interaction: animal ag-
gression, lust; romantic, orgasmic and violently uninhibited;
greed and hoarding, perhaps a commentary on our unfortu-
nate penchant for exorbitant consumerism. The perform-
ers acted on their every primal urge and did so with such
strength and conviction that the heart beat both faster and
slower, palms grew moist and breathing became irregular.
The stunning visual display was complemented to per-
fection by the music of Gísli Galdur Þorgeirsson, who re-
corded, mixed and layered sounds on the spot and dominat-
ed his drum-set, both while audience members took their
seats and throughout the whole of the performance. Gísli
and the performers, Saga Sigurðardóttir, Friðgeir Einarsson,
Margrét Bjarnadóttir, Álfrún Helga Örnólfsdóttir, Jörundur
Ragnarsson and Dóra Jóhannsdóttir, were more than de-
serving of the prolonged standing ovation their collective
performance commanded. Photo by: BIG
- cATHARINE FULTON
29
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 7 — 2009
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The Icelandic landscape was handpainted on
this cup in Japan in 1933 for a posh family in
Iceland who served coffee in porcelain on
Sundays. The whole handpainted collection
travelled through Corea on a mule-train, with
the Siberian express to Moscow, to northern
Europe through Nazi-Germany, onboard a
ship set for Iceland. But now you can see
this cup in Húsið museum in Eyrarbakki.
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