Gunilla Heilborn (S) Potato Country

42% performance 34% dance 24% music

A strangely weightless waiting-room, perhaps. Cheerful and melancholy in equal measure, near and yet far. Someone raises and lowers an arm. It could be foggy or dusk, a tight-knit group walks, as groups walk. Others say that they feel comfortable. And want to belong. Some dance, someone sings in a hoarse voice, a stoic Swede with a guitar mumbles into his beard. Spread out a moment before, they now all make music together, a community of the lonely that soon breaks up again.
Prosaic and dreamlike – this production by choreographer, director and film-maker Gunilla Heilborn, thus far is hardly known outside of Sweden, is hard to grasp and yet sticks in the mind like a melody. More a feeling than a story, but a feeling you know to have been important. And that you can no longer explain why.
Banal and beautiful, ironic and succinct, with floating humour and gentle melancholy, Heilborn blends dance and theatre, text and performance into a genre pot-pourri in a loose musical framework. Who seeks can find almost anything here – except for potatoes: “We will start with a presentation. We are a group. We don’t need much. We need nothing. Thank you.”