“The Ghost at the Feast,” performed at MuCCC by The Sabotage and Gore Foundation, was a lively,
absurdist take on the haunted banquet scene from “Macbeth.” In the
Fringe booklet blurb, the players promised that “Shakespeare purists will
start a protest,” but no such rioting occurred. Instead, the company
earned giggles and guffaws for continuously spouting creative insults with
out-of-place pop cultural references in thick, fake brogues that were
periodically dropped.
The setting of the feast provided a play on the meaning and
purpose for dungeons, and some very unfortunate eavesdropping terrifies the
guests. “Ghost at the Feast” was an innuendo-riddled, gender-bending,
clever play on the play’s events.
“The Ghost at the Feast” will not be performed
again during the 2015 Fringe.
The highlight of my night, however, was “Erik &
the Wolf,” a one-man multisensory retelling of a Swedish folktale from
the 9th or 10th century. Didrik Soderstrom,
of the Brooklyn-based Hnossa Project, took the stage
at Writers & Books with little more than a mic, an amp, and a looper pedal, and spun what is a fairly simple tale into a
magical, immersive yarn through spoken words, song, and vocal layering.
When I say transportive, I’m not
kidding: Soderstrom gave us a sense of place for the
strange love story with some beautifully layered, looping vocal notes, over
which he sang in Swedish and then English. In a dense forest in Northern
Sweden, when Christianity has clasped the land in its jaws and pagan traditions
have dug in defiant claws, a humble woodcutter meets a skin-walker, or
shapeshifter, in the forest.
This performance was expert artistry in storytelling. By
whistling and softly breathing into the mic, he set the scene of an achingly
pretty spring day filled with birdsong and slight gusts of wind. A blissful
summer evening by the fire is constructed of different sounds, as are
suspenseful encounters with wild beasts. All throughout, Soderstrom’s
resonant voice soars and lilts through the story and songs.
“Erik & the Wolf” was lovely and beyond
impressive, and half of the magic was watching Soderstrom
build the story from scratch. He mentioned at the end that The Hnossa Project will be doing video work soon, in which the
source of the vocal effects will be hidden and “it’ll all look like magic,” but
it already did. I hope he keeps performing live, without dropping all of that
work behind the scenes. Oh, and I definitely recommend bringing kids, but
adults will adore it just the same.
“Erik & the Wolf” will be performed again at
Writers & Books on Friday, September 25, at 10 p.m. $7. All ages.
This article appears in Sep 23-29, 2015.
