Um viðburðinn

Everybody's Spectacular 2016 brings together a programme of almighty local and international artists – whose diverse aesthetics bring contemporary performance practice to Iceland – with an abundance of playfulness, seriousness and urgency.

The festival is a joint effort of LÓKAL – international theatre festival and Reykjavík Dance Festival. There are up to 20 productions in the programme, some ticketed and other free! The ticketed prices are under each event but you can also purchase a FESTIVAL PASS for 9.900 iskr which allows you to see 5 shows of your choice.* You simply purchase the pass through tix.is and chose the shows of your liking and send the receipt and your choice of shows to info@spectacular.is.

*(Please note: PEACHES CHRIST SUPERSTAR IS NOT INCLUDED IN THE PASS).

Bergman in Uganda - Markus Öhrn

The slums of Kampala - Uganda’s capital - are home to a unique tradition of live film translation. Local video jockeys translate dialogue and explain the plot as well as various aspects of Western behaviour and lifestyle. Swedish artist Markus Öhrn organised a special screening of Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece Persona (1966) in Kampala and documented the event on film. The VJs commentaries resemble an anthropological exploration, deconstructing and reinterpreting white, bourgoise art with great irony. In Luganda with English Subtitles

Psychography - Gjörningaklúbburinn

Psychography is a new site specific performance by the visual arts group the Icelandic Love Corporation made in collaboration with artists from various fields of art including dance, choreography, theatre, music, film and more.

The work takes places in an old house and its surroundings where the atmosphere and circumstances of the house is explored through different mediums and actions. It is a journey from the sleepless never ending noise of today’s life to the calmness of the growing grass of nature and inner self.

Most houses are filled with stories of the people that live there or have passed through dead or alive. We capture the soul of the house, the self and it’s psychography and give it life through performance – drawing on the different experiences of the artists and the audience who take part in the building, the atmosphere and the aura of the work.

NOTE: the meeting point is at Hallgrímskirkja. Audience will be transported to a secret location from there, please be dressed warmly.

Still Standing You - Pieter Ampe / Guilherme Garrido

After Still Difficult Duet (2007), the first choreographic encounter between the Belgian Pieter Ampe and the Portuguese Guilherme Garrido, in Still Standing You the two dancers open up a boxful of dance passages and in their own mischievous way give us a glimpse of their kaleidoscopic view of friendship.

With a dance idiom entirely their own – distinct from anything else going on in contemporary dance – they shamelessly seek out what they mean to each other. What is the relationship between them? Are they friends, partners, lovers, rivals or even enemies?

The only instrument they can use is their own body, the irony of their displays of muscle, the intensity of this boyish friendship, the capacity to turn one’s own limitations into virtuosity and the ability to combine all this into a dynamic performance in which ruggedness, anger and love are entwined in one great physical and all-encompassing embrace. The only thing they know for sure, is that they are ‘partners in crime’, the Indian and the cowboy that ride their horse through the bumpy hills in direction of the sunset…

It´s Volleyball Hallelujah - Dio

Volleyball players/actresses Aðalbjorg Arnadottir (outside hitter) and Ylfa Áskelsdottir (middle blocker) make up the duo Díó. 5 years ago they stepped into the idiosyncratic, complex world of Icelandic adult volleyball. After dozens of competitions around the country, plenty of medals, drama and injury, they are eager to invite you to join them for an evening of volleyball.

It's Volleyball Hallelujah is a performance which takes its script and structure from the movement score of an adult volleyball final. Throughout the research phase, the performers have conducted numerous interviews, while documenting their own careers as rising stars within the world of adult volleyball.

The piece is performed, devised and directed by the two actresses in collaboration with four other performance-based artists who have assisted with dramaturgy, text, scenography and movements.

Beat the Drum : The Walk - Verk Produksjoner

«Beat the Drum» is a series of works focusing on the present and the future. How do we deal with the tremendous problems of the present, and how do we continue? Can art be a part of this new beginning or not?

«Beat the Drum: Walk» deals with people’s concern that they live in a bubble, and with questions of what kind of art is important today and how one can make new stories and connections.

In the beginning of the performance, the audience is taken for a walk through the neighbourhood and asked to contemplate the future. Through stories, bodies, and the space that we share, Verk Produksjoner creates a contemporary ritual that intensifies the understanding of our interconnectedness. People have shared with them their dreams, anecdotes and thoughts on the present times.

The performance is an ongoing research on our present times. It is a strong urge for Verk Produksjoner to transform their work and ask new questions towards their aesthetics and ethics, a wish to construct new stories, new beginnings and contexts. They are in search after urgent and new ways of sharing and opening up their work. Their ambition is to connect, opening the space and transforming it, evolving together with the audience in producing new realities and visions.

«Beat the Drum» is their first step in that process. Their question and interest is: What do you see around you today, what do you wish to see around you today, and what are you willing to offer.

Spotted - Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir

The duet performance “Spotted” belongs to “The Blind Spotting Performance Series “ which includes at this point; “Blind Spotting”, a performance with an original cast of 8 dancers which premiered at the Sophiensaele theater in Berlin spring 2014, “Blind Spotting- film version”, an artistic film created from the original 8 dancers performance, the duet performance “Spotted, and the solo performance “In the Blind Spot” which premiered in spring 2015.

In “Spotted” the body of the performers is captured as an overflowing container. So full that it can not anymore digest, make sense or work through all the external information it receives. As well as all that seeps into it without any subjective control or awareness. Numb and leaking, on the verge of passing as still lives, the performers make us question topics that relate to us directly such as privacy, intimacy, alienation and vulnerability

contact Gonzo - Contact Gonzo

contact Gonzo return to Reykjavík, after their first visit during RDF in 2014. This time – introducing their practice to a group of teenagers from the city.

Founded in 2006, contact Gonzo is an improvisational performance group based in Osaka, Japan. The collective has developed a specific mode of contact improvisation that borrows from sources ranging from martial arts to internet trends. Based on both physical strength and agility, and trusting relationships within the group, contact Gonzo powerfully balances elements of contemporary dance, performance art, and urban and popular cultures. Dispersing and occupying public buildings, theatres, museums and alleyways around the world, their work is typically a series of arresting encounters that teeter on an edge between violence and tenderness.

contact Gonzo has been presented in Japan, Singapore, New York, Moscow, Rio, Reykjavik, Zurich, Budapest and Ljubljana among other places.

Besides being a company, contact Gonzo is also a name of a method they have developed by Masaru Kakio and Yuya Tsukahara starting on 2006.

In recent years contact Gonzo became the focus of increasing attention in both the performing arts and contemporary art scenes that led to participation in international exhibitions and arts festivals and international dance festivals around the world.

Sunday Double bill - Íslenski Dansflokkurinn / Rósa Ómarsdóttir og Inga Huld Hákonardóttir

Sunday Double Bill replaying the work of The Valley by Inga Huld Hákonardóttir and Rósa Ómarsdóttir, which premiered in RDF's November edition in 2015. And Iceland Dance Company's What a Feeling – choreographed by Halla Ólafsdóttir and Lovisa Ósk Vilhjalmsdóttir. See more information at spectacular.is

Under Influence

Under Influence is a fiction feature film portraying the mysterious and psychotic journey of the actress Julia Gordon, who frenetically turns her imagination into a living world away from the humdrum existence of her contemporaries. Frustrated by the character that she is playing in a new motion picture titled Being Kate Winslet, Julia Gordon finds comfort under the influence of charismatic classic film characters – which she repetitively turns into.

Under Influence is shaped like a maze of real and naturalistic events, of series of cuts, of shifts and collisions between the real world and fictional ones, of complete imaginary and fantastic situations, of visualization of thoughts, of mental associations, of wishes and fantasies that swirl through the mind of an actress who conveys her dreams to us. The plot being the point of entry into a kaleidoscopic experience of identity and of cinema in the way of a visual, auditory and physical journey.

Written, directed & produced by: Sidney Leoni

Starring: Halla Ólafsdóttir, Christine de Smedt, Steven Wendt, Mariana My Suikkanen Gomes, Alexandra Cismondi, Elias Girod, Sidney Leoni, Zoë Poluch, Manon Santkin

Cinematography: Hoang-Son Doan

EVERYBODY'S CINEMA with Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir, Boris Charmatz, Diego Agulló and Jorge Ruiz Abánades

Presented within the frame of the festival Every Body´s Spectacular, EVERYBODY'S CINEMA programme, we will present three exceptional video works – Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir's Blind Spotting (the film), Diego Agulló's Dancing Plague and Boris Charmatz's Levée – as a triple bill.

Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir – Blind Spotting

With an ensemble of eight dancers, Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir's film version ofBlind Spotting steps into the blind spot of the exhausted common body in order to excavate its power from its alleged weakness. In arrestingly and at the same time unsettling pictures, Blind Spotting exposes the vulnerability of our fragile bodies in our achievement-oriented society.

Boris Charmatz – Levée

The 24 dancers of the choreographic piece Levée des conflits, by Boris Charmatz, perform an extract of the show on top of a slag-heap in Germany. Film maker César Vayssié and choreographer Boris Charmatz filmed this never ending spiral with their on-board helicopter camera.

Diego Agulló and Jorge Ruiz Abánades – Dancing Plague

The short film Dancing Plague is the new work of a long collaboration of more than thirteen years between Diego Agulló and Jorge Ruiz Abánades. Based on three images of Peter Brueghel the Elder, and taking as a handwritten texts that recount the phenomenon of multitudes known as "dancing mania” or “Dance of San Vito”, this film delves into the theme of the dance and its close affinity with the uncontrollable forces of chaos: immediate ability to interrupt work time, enabling another exceptional time of the bizarre, the jovial and festive but also of social disorder and catastrophe.

Just pretend I´m not here

If we are not pandas, then why do we behave like pandas? Just Pretend I'm Not Here is an interactive tragedy where the audience strives to rediscover themselves. We invite you to enter the theatre and undertake a test where we lead you through different stages of self-enlightenment, and where you have to face your inner panda. The work raises questions about what it means to be a human being in the era of constant surveillance and how we create our self-image when our private life has become the property of the government/corporate world.  
*16 ára aldurstakmark