Reykjavík Grapevine - 24.08.2012, Qupperneq 32

ICELAND AIRWAVES IS A
SELLOUT?
Ever since Iceland Airwaves’ organisers announced that the
festival had sold out completely, and
that there were no
tickets left for anyone
(except maybe some
folks in the market
for package deals,
there might be some
of those left), our
phones, e-mails,
Twitters and Facebooks have been
blazing with peeps desperate to gain
admission to the five-day Mother Of All
Parties Featuring Lotsa Great Bands
And Fun Time Activities Such As Binge
Drinking And Partying™ (just around
the time bands stopped bugging us
for a slot to play at the festival—as if
we have any say in who plays). People
are DESPERATE to
score tickets to the
bash, and it’s no
wonder; featuring
performances
from Of Monsters
And Men, Nico
Muhly, Gone
Postal, Sóley,
GusGus, Beneath and Sigur Rós,
Iceland Airwaves 2k12 promises to be
a total scorcher. Your Friends At The
Grapevine will of course document
the festival closely, as always—look for
festival tips, trix, highlights, interviews
and reviews of EVERY SINGLE SHOW at
www.airwaves.grapevine.is (but not
quite yet—we are trying to make it look
real nice before we open it).
PROBLEMS = SOLVED!
Our ever-vigilant readers have been contacting us to
complain about the
functionality of
our classifieds and
listings websites
(www.classifieds.
grapevine.is and
www.listings.
grapevine.is).
While the offending
problems have been resolved, rest
assured that we are hard at work at
improving these sites and the user’s
experience, so stay tuned and keep
using ‘em! They’re free!
WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!
Lókal is happening! Reykjavík Dance Festival is happening! Stop reading
this and go check ‘em out, RIGHT NOW!
August
WHAT THE EFF IS
GOING ON???
32 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 13 — 2012ART
CONCERT
R E V I E W
THEATER
R E V I E W
Poets, Queers, Superheroes And Captives
Lonely actors in the Westfjords at the annual Act Alone festival
9
AUG
12
AUG
Suðureyri www.sudureyri.is/sudureyri-is/actalone/
It started off with the tale of a
poet and ended without words.
In-between, we got a couple of
clowns, yoga, dance, a French
lesson, history lessons, two trou-
badours and the occasional beer
or two. And a lot of famous tales
that will likely never see publica-
tion because they were off the
record, because the dictaphone
was off.
Act Alone is a solo performance fes-
tival that has been held in Ísafjörður
(The Westfjords’ biggest town) for the
last eight years. But no more. Now
it's being held in Suðureyri (popula-
tion 269—a 20 minute drive from
Ísafjörður). And while the reason is
a deal with a local sponsor, this is a
happy marriage of convenience by
all accounts, since the small locale
means the festival is less scat-
tered than it had been in Ísafjörður
(and after a weekend in Suðureyri,
Ísafjörður suddenly feels really big):
here absolutely everything is right
next to everything else.
The opening act was local actor
Ársæll Níelsson's 'Skáldið á Þröm'
('The Poet at World's Edge'), the
lyrical, yet harsh, tale of Magnús
Hj. Magnússon, a down-on-his luck
small-town poet whose entire life
seemed an eternal struggle with
poverty, sickness and other hardship.
That sort of struggle was certainly
not unique in the Westfjords of 1910,
but what sets Magnús’s tale apart are
the 3,000+ pages of writing he left
behind and form the basis of the play.
There's beauty to be found here, but
also ugliness. Magnús was certainly
no saint, but he was a real poet, the
best example perhaps being that Hall-
dór Laxness lifted whole passages
straight from the diaries for his novel
'World Light.'
The play was performed in an
abandoned stockfish factory, which
proved to be a great theatre, and
Ársæll used the spare surroundings
to the fullest. He gave two shows the
same night (and I do recommend
seeing it twice) and the second time
around he managed a tear near
the end, when the poet disappears
onstage. Like stage actors do, it's but
a footstep in the sand.
I wondered why I hadn't seen
this fine actor perform before as we
got to back the hotel. Order the first
round of the night, I learn that our
outstanding performer is also the
local hotel’s manager. A trained actor
who chose Suðureyri as his home-
base, Ársæll is living proof that good
actors can prosper anywhere. And he
claims hotel management (busy in
the summer) and acting (busy in the
winter) go very well together.
Sex And The City: The Dance
An actor alone on stage. It seems very
simple and basic, yet the varieties on
show were surprising. I've chosen
to focus my four highlights of the
festival, the second of which was
Steinunn Ketilsdóttir's 'Superhero',
a dance performance based on a 'Sex
And The City' obsessed couch potato.
Steinunn truly managed to draw you
in with the dance-less opening mono-
logue, before the dance itself started,
proving to be just as adept as an actor
as she was a dancer—and then her
dance proved a perfect continuation
of the monologue, deepening the
seeming facile tale and showing the
struggle behind the character's life.
Then we got 'Svikarinn' (“The
Traitor”), a mad and complicated play
that you would probably have to see
a dozen of times to fully grasp, yet
the underlying theme was crystal
clear: the sexuality of a middle aged
gay man, with all the baggage and
underlying repression it carries. It's a
wild and grand performance by Árni
Pétur Guðjónsson, himself a middle-
aged gay man. And it certainly feels
like a autobiographical piece in a very
roundabout way. Here he performs
all the roles of Jean Genet's play 'The
Maidens' but regularly interrupts it
with his own musings and thoughts,
thereby mixing the love for a specific
work of art with his own struggles,
although there are obviously vast
differences, for example there is
only a brief glimpse of the hilarious
Árni Pétur you met on the streets of
Suðureyri. Yes, in a town this small
you're bound to engage in small con-
versations with just about everyone
you end up writing about.
That also gives you a bit of an in-
sight into how the actor's work is not
just focused on the acting itself. They
(and their directors and co-workers)
were constantly speaking of screws
and bolts and lightning, of getting
the logistics ready in time, seemingly
confident with their lines and acting.
The most extreme example of this
may have been the closing play.
Most of the acts had been
performed in the local community
centre, so there wasn’t a lot of time to
change the stage between acts but,
like the first act, the last one took
place in the old stock fish factory—
and the guys working on that show
had tirelessly built a brand new set. It
would prove to be a major co-star for
the lone actor of 'Fastur' (“Stuck”).
The name says it all, really, our
protagonist is stuck in a box when
the play starts, and even if he frees
himself from the box he's then just
stuck in a room. It's a wordless play
about captivity, and a very physical
one, leaving actor Benedikt Karl
Gröndal all battered and bruised after
the show.
It works on many levels, first you
instinctively think of a prisoner in
Afghanistan or Iraq, but then realise
this could be anytime anywhere,
this primal helplessness that comes
with being stuck in a place you can't
get out of. But while having some
existentialism thrown in it's also
hilarious too, and probably the play
the kids seemed to enjoy the most.
Oh yeah, there were a number of
kids attending just about every show,
including the ones that weren't really
for kids. Only they were. Because
kids can often process the toughest of
plays, just like art festivals can pros-
per in the smallest and unlikeliest of
towns.
- ÁSGEIR H. INGóLFSSON
Baldur Pan