ICELAND AIRWAVES 2022 DAY 2

Cyber at Yeoman

Another day of music and theatre and the theatrical element of the duo Cyber is not to be denied. They played an off-venue show in the same boutique that JFDR did yesterday. It was a wild show, their uninhibited dance moves fit the hip-hop backing tracks perfectly, with some social commentary thrown in, like the song No Cry about a disconsolate twerker's dealings with sadness (but not romantic sadness!) It had a scream-along part in the middle that the whole crowd got into.

Moving on to another kind of theatre:

One of the goals of thius trip was to catch some Icelandic Theatre.

Tonight’s play is in the tradition of the National Theatre’s fantastic stage productions—Tyrfing Tyrfingsson’s play Sjö ævintýri um skömm (Seven Adventures of Shame). Expanded from an earlier one-act play, this play has been a popular hit. Several of Iceland’s most celebrated stage and screen actors were in it, including the lead Ilmur Kristjánsdóttir (from the TV series Trapped!), Ólafía Hrönn Jónsdóttir (White Night Wedding), the venerable Kristbjörg Kjeld (who starred in the film Mamma Gogo), and Hilmir Snær (101 Reykjavík) playing against his usual leading man type. This play was a series of vignettes that start with an analyst(?) who is trying to help Ilmur's character deal with her rage issues while he is getting drunker and drunker. It goes wilder from there. I’ll just say that it had the most outrageous artificial insemination scene-gone-wrong, followed by the most outrageous natural insemination scene-gone-wrong. This was not standard dinner theatre fare:



Immediately after the play, there was an old-school cabaret in the cellar of the theatre, featuring classic burlesque routines. It was a little naughty (almost quaint compared to the play) and even had a sword-swallowing clown!

After all that I did manage to catch the band Altin Gün at the Art Museum venue, they were competent, with dual drummers, guitar, bass, keyboards and even an electric bazouki!

Moving on to another theatre, Gamla Bío, I caught a late show by HAM, the outrageous bad boys of 80s Icelandic rock. They are older but still untamed, with the scary Óttarr Proppé growling out the vocals. If you like this kind of punk-machine-metal music it doesn’t get any better than this:

HAM at Gamla Bío