Five Festival Favourites for Finch

some weird art, yesterday

Following one of my infantile rants, Patrina Finch said she had a taste for 'weird choreography from the EU'. So here's a selection of things that fit into at least two of those categories.

Mamoru Iriguchi

I think Mamoru is going to the Fringe, probably at Summerhall, but I'll need to check. Anyway, he gets in under 'weird' and 'choreography'. He wears a projector on his bike helmet and films himself as he wanders about the stage, sends up the stereotype of the strange oriental artist, has a great deal of charm and gets spooky when he uses backwards film. I'd like to explain more clearly, but that would probably miss the point: it might err on the side of whacky, but there is something going on in this man's mind that demands a stage.

Gecko
Ticks all three boxes, and I saw this one a few months back. Perhaps one of the most playful meditations on alienation ever to reach the stage, it is some guys trying to make sense of an office that has all sorts of tricks hidden in drawers, up filing cabinets and that.

I'm a bit worried that the set, which is its own character in the way of these things, is a bit big for the usual Fringe get in (twenty minutes after the comedian finishes... maybe a meat raffle going on next door), but Gecko are going to be one of those 'surprise' hits of August 2015 (that is, not a surprise at all, since they have established themselves as game-changers over the past decade).

Richard Move
Hang on, this isn't at the Fringe.

Butoh Medea
Not the hardest sale for me: it's the Greek classic done as Butoh. I have some really cool images of this somewhere which I am going to turn into a comic strip... time pending... Not from the EU, but Butoh is double weird.

Joan Cleville
With that name and accent, I reckon he is French (EU!), via Dundee (Scottish Dance Theatre), it's at Dance Base (choreography) and... well, I am not sure it is weird at all. In fact, none of this is really weird, not as weird as, say, carrying a coffin down Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday Night behind a skipping David Hoyle...