Continuing with its Flying Solo Festival, the Contact Theatre welcomes Amsterdam based artist Igor Vrebac to its premises to perform his one man performance, My Father Was A Terrorist. I was very intrigued to see Igor’s show from having read that the piece was inspired from the accounts of Zak Ebrahim, whose father was one the men who planned the 1993 World Trade Center terror attack and through psychical movement and dark humour he would explore how much pain a man can endure before it transforms him psychically and have an effect on a person’s perception. What I saw was something completely different.
Within the large performance space, Igor enters, dressed as if has just come from the gym and carrying a large bag over his shoulder. He looks at the audience with a surprised but focused expression.
He lays the large carrier bag to the ground and from within it pulls out a timer and sets it to forty-five minutes. As the red numbers slowly countdown, our performer stands before us and starts jumping, Lots and lots of jumping. Every ten minutes the performer would stop, drink some water, say a word and then continue to jump on the spot again.
I am very split about Igor’s performance. On one side I admired Igor and what he was trying to portray. Pushing his body with athletic enthusiasm and determination; heavily breathing as he continued to repeat this action. Twisting his body and in one segment titled ‘pain’, sticking a towel in his mouth and continue jumping. But on the other side I just felt like saying ‘its forty-five minutes of a man jumping on the spot and having a personal rave at the end’. It felt more like an endurance test for the audience than it did for the performer. When Igor stopped to recover from his jumping I was hoping it would lead to something else, something new but again it was more jumping, but this time without a shirt. I could not find the connection with the subject matter he was aiming to present as it got lost in the excessive jumping.
Igor is a both a charismatic and a focused performer. He balances the both comedy and energy well, especially near the end, with a big smile on his face whilst jumping and raising his hands to Haddaway’s classic dance anthem, ‘What is Love?’ Myself and the audience giggled but I felt like Mr Vrebec was more focused on showing off his healthy athleticism than exploring an unexplored subject matter.
Reviewer: Luke Richards
Reviewed: 12th May 2016
