The Gothenburg Fringe festival offers an array of art and performance, with genres varying from theatre and dance to comedy, music, poetry and so much more. Just when you think you know what you want to see, or what you think you're seeing the festival has a way of taking you somewhere else entirely.
Seeing things is just the beginning. Realising what you've seen, being surprised by it, challenged and confronted with the unexpected elements within each performance is the true nature of any art form. My personal journey through the festival focused primarily on dance, but I love theatre too.
At about the mid-point of the festival, I started to make connections between the very different pieces I had seen. They seemed to run parallel themes. Part of this concerned aspects of being seen, how we see, who we see, how we see them, if we see them at all, why we need to see them. Eliza Schneider's “Freedom of Speech” makes us see some 'normal' everyday people, people you may not ever meet, might
turn away from and we become aware of all those other people out there and their stories and we realise how they connect to us. “Everyone thinks they're the crazy one”, she says, “Everyone thinks they're the minority.”
Freedom of Speech - photo: Uros Hocevar
“Feminal” by Becca Hoback, examined perceptions of how women are seen, what do you think you are looking at? What is really beneath the surface? A similar theme ran through “Who Cares” by Evie Demetriou, also inspecting, in this case her own changing female body but more importantly directing us to see the bigger picture. What do you care about? She questions “Should I care, about the homeless, immigrants, children in war?” Who matters and who doesn't?
Feminal - photo: Uros Hocevar
Which brings me to “Please Don't...” by WhiteSmoke. This two-hander, one a soldier the other a civilian, set at the Oscar II Fort showed us the horror of war. In the moment you are passive, watching the play but then you are appealed to by the civilian: “Aren't you going to do something?”
Returning to womankind, Kaytlin Bailey's “Whore's Eye View” demands us to stop turning a blind eye to sex workers and really see them, as the women, sisters, daughters, mothers that they are and help to keep them safe, advocating “Be kind to sex workers.”
Whore's Eye View - photo: Uros Hocevar
Finally, Dynamite Lunchbox Entertainment gave us a true story in “Josephine” about Josephine Baker. Depicting the lows and the highs of this remarkable woman's life. Her struggle to be seen and respected in a world designed to segregate and denigrate her. Her fight for herself, her own rights and her work for black people's rights.
All these works challenge perceptions and raise questions of what we see, what we think we are seeing and how we can change both. They say first impressions last, but performance at this level can stay with you, can change you and those Fringe impressions last.
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