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Bremen

Samir Akika Joujouville

by Falk Schreiber

While the audience is still looking for their seats, a play is already underway on Theresa Isabella Malessa's stage. In Reise nach Jerusalem, Theater Bremen's own company Unusual Symptoms races back and forth between fabric platforms, living sculptures are created, later there are card tricks, later still knives are drawn and blood is shed. But at first it’s mainly a lot of giggling, cheering and screaming, a childlike, sometimes concentrated, sometimes chaotic game that Samir Akika creates with Joujouville.

Joujouville means something like "toy town", the name of a shop that Akika remembers from his childhood, which stimulated the choreographer's imagination: it was not primarily about trying out the admired toys, it was mainly about imagining what you could do with the dolls, bicycles, and building blocks. This understanding of play as an exercise in imagination also characterizes Joujouville: some of the rules shown only appear to emerge in the moment of the game itself, some are discussed with great seriousness and then peter out without comment, some are silly, some embarrassing. And some simply don't work.

The fact that the "play city" in this concept is the stage is not the most original discovery of the evening. Nor is dance reinterpreted as a game, in a touching pas de deux between Andor Rusu and Young-Won Song or in a perhaps slightly too long folkloristic solo by Csenger K. Szabó. In this sense, play is something that has to do with physical exertion, with craftsmanship and virtuosity, but what is really interesting are the sticking points at which the play runs dry or tips into the dark: when Nora Ronge repeatedly disrupts the dance with her annoying recorder whistling while the dancing itself has long since left behind the childish flute playing. When Gabrio Gabrielli performs an Italopop karaoke that is bordering on the embarrassing. When Song realizes that she does not like the bloody horror game (into which the evening eventually begins to drift) as much as she expected: "No! I don’t like this!» Playing also means listening to yourself. And making it clear when your own wishes don’t coincide with what is happening.

Not least, Joujouville is an indication of how consistently Alexandra Morales and Gregor Runge's curatorial management model works at the Theater Bremen. A year ago, Unusual Symptoms performed Lola Arias' Happy Nights here, a dance installation on the subject of deviant, commercial sexuality. Back then, too, it was about games (which are literally called that in the BDSM context), not with childish but equally imaginative creativity. So this entertaining, likeable, strange evening shows how cleverly this company develops a theme in a new direction.

Again on 20 February;
www.theaterbremen.de