From a selection of building blocks scattered around the stage, Martin Zimmerman carefully constructs a makeshift chair. From afar, it looks no different to all the other chairs onstage: a simple, spindly wooden skeleton. Only we know that it can’t function in the same way; that it would not suffer being sat upon. It is a chair in form alone, wholly at odds with those chipped and bow-legged examples that surround it.
This duality hovers over the whole of Öper Öpis, which translates from the Swiss as ‘Something Something’. Its stage is split into two: above the stable floor is a platform raised on a central pivot, which lurches and tilts as performers reconfigure themselves on its surface. The shifting sands of this higher plane seem a fluid realm of ideas, home to a world infused with vibrant colour and circus. The everyday becomes extraordinary; not just actions, but human hydraulics. Performers contort and loop through the air, become weightless, become rigid, become super-human, become ideal. It is an Escheresque city of stretched possibilities and multiple perspectives, always familiar and always fantastic.
Into this, through a trapdoor that lowers onto his head, pops the wiry Zimmerman, as wide-eyed as we are. It is as if he has drifted into his own headspace, where the world and its inhabitants are seen through the rose-tinted glasses of personal insecurity. Everyone is stronger, fitter, faster, better. In short, they are spectacular and Zimmerman must struggle to match them.
Only, of course, he can’t. The individuals are extremes – burly strongmen or elastic contortionists – and Zimmerman is the everyman in their midst. To us, however, with our outsider’s view unburdened by the nit-picking subjectivity of the self, he is entirely their equal. We see a blend of freakishness and idealised beauty, both the strengths and weaknesses to which Zimmerman himself is blind.
However, Öper Öpis is far more than mere confidence-bolstering. It thumps with existential enquiry, begging questions of identity, imperfection and our place within the world. Repeatedly – and often quite literally – human forms become objects and what was inanimate becomes oppositely anthropomorphised. Actions and reactions ripple around the space as if the Butterfly effect were the sole governing principle.
On top of all this is the awe-inspiring scratch score created live onstage by DJ Dimitri de Perrot. Constructed with wit, de Perrot uses an array of techniques, including the graze and scrape of needle on vinyl, sampled LPs that he sends fizzing off into the wings after use and, best of all, looped recordings taken from the onstage action, such that the slap of hefty, sweaty thighs becomes the base beat for a gym work-out sequence. It’s so immediate and synergetic that you begin to question whether the music isn’t dancing to the choreography.
All that said, the actual experience of Öper Öpis is less exuberant than one might expect. As a piece it suffers from being strangely detached and even dispassionate. The rhythm can feel relentless, almost to the point of monotony, where we could use the opportunity to savour its spectacle. There is something almost too cool, too self-satisfied about it, as if each gaspworthy feat is followed by a quick glance in the mirror. That vanity strips Öper Öpis of a vital humanity and prohibits it both from stretching itself towards the tipping point of failure and a wholehearted subscription to the rules of counterbalance that the dual stage requires.
As it turns out, then, the ideas are all there, but the blemished reality is all too often airbrushed out.
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