21 May, 2011

There'd been some promotion about some thing, some sort of art, flying in the skies, that would be in town, on Austurvellir, at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon. I had nothing planned, and it sounded interesting.

I wasn't the only one. No-one knew what we were going to see, but the weather was fantastic, and the square was full.

I still don't know what I saw. It was put on by La Fura dels Baus, a Catalan theatre company, with all the dangling people being local icelandic volunteers.

There was 20 minutes or so of what might have been a back story, with a caped, mustachioed man being pulled around the square by a team of men/slaves, singing and yelling while some other woman came down on a cable from the church across the square. There was some sort of birth scene suspended in the air, then a whole lot of people tied themselves to some steel frames and flew around in the sky for a while. Oh, and the whole thing was drowned in extremely loud music.

While it was certainly a spectacle, and it certainly took a lot of coordination and practice to pull it all together, it just felt like half a show. A lot of the portions of it were invisible to people, behind trees, or just starting in another part of the square with no hints to look somewhere else. Tossed down from the skies we had regular glitter, coloured flour, and fake euro bank notes. I have no idea what the intention of any of this was.

There's only so long you can look at people opening and closing their arms and legs, starfish style, before you get bored of it. Maybe it was just too avant garde for me, but I'm not sure I'd even get out of bed to see another show of theirs.