Springback Academy 2018
Review
Forecasting
Premier Stratagème
Ever sought instruction in how to feed a pill to a cat, stroke a vagina or decorate a cake? Wondering how to lather your face, train a parrot or handle a gun? Created by Barbara Matijević and Giuseppe Chico, this exceedingly entertaining and revealing solo that’s not a solo could satisfy your needs. We’re initially welcomed, multi-lingually, by a 15-inch MacBook Pro centre stage. Its partner, soon to enter, is Matijević. Clad in plaid shirt and jeans, her voice and body enlarge and enhance a seamless series of YouTube postings – bringing them, by extension, off the screen and into the room. Smart juxtapositions highlight the sometimes absurd human need to share often private matters. What is also unostentatiously underlined is the mix of ego or loneliness driving people to do so. Matijević is good, really good – confident, mutable – and the work itself quite, quite clever.
Our daily routines can be banal and unexciting, our quirky hobbies and fetishes well-hidden and laughable. And yet we are here, on the web, breathing and sweating. How to make a show out of our dreary lives? Barbara Matijević and Giuseppe Chico opted for a shiny laptop which the former manipulates as her own extension, waltzing around with it, carrying it across the stage, and virtually introducing her body parts into the kinkiest YouTube amateur videos on earth. Matijević is, by turns, a cat lady, a gun lover, or an SM addict among many other temporary identities.
Constantly distorting the narrative frame, she offers an incredibly funny and thought-provoking result, garnished with tongue-in-cheek acting and flawless execution. Witty, hybrid and profoundly humane, Forecasting is a perfect anti-depressant. On a side note, it will teach you how to choose the best boxing gloves!