Reviews

A motion-picture screen. Some plastic bags. Simon Norrthon. More props than so is not needed in order to do a magnificent performance. A pair of blown-up bags dance carefully over the stage. It is hypnotic; tranquil but very charged. The bags moves hesitantly, in a way that resemble small leaps, in the draught that exists by the floor.
During a meagre hour several of Simon Norrthon’s earlier characters turn alive again. First they have been cleaned, choreographed. Is it imagination, or do the movements remind of the plastic bags involuntarily dance in the beginning of the performance?
With and without music a movement pattern is repeated, often motionless and almost all the time in the center of the room. It is monotonous and nerdy, but the audience sits spellbound. It is alluring. Why?
Actors steps in and out of roles; dancers repeat movement. Montage 2 becomes a successful conception between the two. Simon Norrthon disappears behind his roles, so who is that actually dance? Whithout doubt a body, a person that dresses in forgotten roles, which then dance. But who is it that actually dance? The actor Simon Norrthon or the natures of the characters that he have played? Something special is happening at Weld, as the experimental platform of Anna Koch is called.
The dance is neither beautiful nor provoking in any way. In all its hesitancy and here comes the plastic bags into the discussion again, is the dance we are given only possible when the body (the bag) is filled with something. Without air in the bag, without the contribution of someone's breath, the bags' dance would be impossible. Without Norrthon’s body none of his role interpretations would be able to perform Koch’s choreography. And nevertheless – the one who has filled the bags with air, the one that has given the bags a structure, is not more present than as a reminder of a creator. Same strangeness occurs with Norrthon.
Beautiful it is not, as said before, but enjoyable all the time. At one moment a hand is drawn against the back of an otherwise unused motion-picture screen. The screen bends slightly, and remains so a long while after the body has been removed. Expressions become traces.

Johan Ranstam Teaterstockholm.se