Auckland Arts Festival: Revenge of the pencil sharpener

Photo / Soren Meisner

See what happens when the boss turns his back in the fantasy world of BLAM! says Dionne Christian

It's a fairly cosmopolitan telephone interview: Iceland-born and Denmark-based theatre-maker Kristjan Ingimarsson is talking to me from Istanbul, Turkey, about the show that he's bringing to the Auckland Arts Festival in March.

Ingimarsson reckons no matter where we are, we all dream of not being at work and so drift off into the fantasy world of imagination.

Described as Die Hard meets The Office, the wordless BLAM! is physical theatre for action movie fans and shows just how far disengagement takes bored paper-pushers trapped under a borderline sociopathic manager. Whenever his back is turned, these guys reinvent themselves as villains and heroes from films and comics. The play combines physical theatre, parkour, circus, daredevil stunts and office stationery with a heavy metal score and warnings about highly stylised slapstick violence and mild strobe lighting.

Ingimarsson knows of the Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant sitcom The Office and says BLAM! is a very different proposition. Gervais saw BLAM! in London and, says Ingimarsson, tweeted he'd like to be in it.

"The thing to do, when I was a kid, was to go to see a film in the afternoon and I would see the action movies," he says. "I'd come out at 3pm, into the sunlight, but it was like I was still inside a bubble ... seeing things in a kind of slow motion and still feeling caught up in the action of it even though many action movies tend to be so ridiculous. I wanted to capture some of that and find the fun, the childishness of it."

He likes creating theatre with "twisted thought experiments" about what he sees as the more absurd aspects of modern life. "It's a metaphor for how we are living today -- how we are hyper-scheduled and plan our time so we are always sticking to the schedule we've created -- and how mundane a lot of the tasks we have to do actually are.

What I want people to realise is what we do now, the way we live, isn't unchangeable. It happens because we have, in some way, all agreed this is the way it shall be."

As founder and artistic director of Neander Theatre, I can't imagine Ingimarsson is often in the office, but he says three-quarters of his time is spent on admin when he'd rather be working with actors.

His work is characterised by high-energy, rhythmic sequences, surreal effects, comic as well as more poignant moments, but he doesn't like descriptions which make the shows sound overly intellectual.

Being wordless makes BLAM! easier to travel and it has received acclaim in Europe and Britain since its creation in 2012. That it's still touring, and getting positive audience feedback, supports Ingimarsson's belief that we can all relate to the story however mind-boggling the action sequences may be.

BLAM! has been described as a show with special appeal to men who, traditionally, don't book theatre tickets.

Auckland Arts Festival

What: BLAM!
Where and when: The Civic, March 6-10