The Horrible Facts Opens Impulstanz Festival

Vienna – A performance by the frontman. Jeans, a green T-shirt, long hair. His battered face utters unintelligible sounds. A body that tumbles and thrashes about. Trembling all over, he crawls onto and over his electronic audio feedback-blaring band, The Horrible Facts. The band is his stage: no people, but six ‘horrible facts’ in the form of oversized wooden speakers.

This is how the piece What do you mean what do you mean and other pleasantries by Maarten Seghers begins at the Schauspielhaus Vienna. It also kicks off this year’s Impulstanz edition which opened in the large hall of the museum last Tuesday with Hit the Boom-Show by Doris Uhlich. The solo act is part of the [8:tension] series which is integrated into the festival. The Belgian Seghers frequently works with Jan Lauwers' Needcompany, but also performs solo as a musician/performer and installation/video artist.

This man, who at the beginning of his What do you mean performance ties a long board to his head and body, enjoys giving concert shows with such titles as The Tragedy of The Applause. His contribution to the festival is a concert. It consists of a song which questions, for one hour, everything that is typically associated with music romance. Are pop rituals being mocked here?

Perhaps. While it is true that pop culture has no problem laughing at itself, it is also true that the rich culture of pop music is all too happy to convey deep seriousness. It creates icons which are worshipped because they are masters at manipulating feelings. The frontman ridicules this horrible fact too: A character who first whines a bit because he forgot his password and subsequently gets stuck, on stage, in his own song. Faced with such hopelessness, all he can do is appeal to the heart of the audience: "I want to feel it. / It wants to feel you." This goes on and on, using audio feedback, until: "I can't do this."

But he who goes up and down on stage with a board between his legs can’t get off the stage either. "I'm so touchable, I'm so touched." – "It's a feast of feelings. / It makes me change." These lyrics are an avalanche of words. The frontman pushes the stone of his performance ahead of him, but it keeps rolling back. "C'm on, feel it!" The words disintegrate into doggerel; the language runs out; the so-called attention to the auditorium is unmasked and turns out to be a farce.

With this performance, the theatre of the absurd celebrates the sensual freedom of life and pop music, the normality of madness, the stage as a prison cell, the creation of art as a labour of Sisyphus. Seghers works extremely hard for his audience, keeping it riveted through the end. This is funny, with a fatalistic touch and having a huge and enigmatic impact at the same time.