One by one, Helsinki Nelson's wrestlers come running onto the stage of the City Theatre. On the mat is the biggest of the bunch, lying on his stomach, stretched out in a defensive position. Alternately, his opponent tries to tip him, pushing him flat on the mat with both his shoulders. In vain. Accordion punk rocker Kommi Pohjonen comes up, and with one sonic blast of his instrument, the giant flies off the mat. The music wins.
Accordion Wrestling, the brainchild of Pohjonen, is the weirdest show at the 2012 Holland Festival. But first some background. In frantic attempts to make his beloved instrument a little hipper, Pohjonen has been wildly experimenting for some time, mixing folk, rock and electronic music with the traditional sounds of his instrument.
In this quest, Pohjonen came across a striking history. Between the 1920s and 1960s, accordion was played in Finland during local wrestling matches. Incidentally, this is not about those ridiculous hyper-aggressive Hulk Hogan-like clown acts, but the pure Olympic styles: Greco-Roman and Free Style. Afterwards, there was dancing. For many years in Finland, this was how the world's oldest über-masculine martial art went hand in hand with folk dance and tearjerkers as a matter of course. This underground phenomenon disappeared when amplified music took over.
Great story, of course. And worthy of a documentary in its own right. Unfortunately, Pohjonen fails to turn Accordion Wrestling into an exciting performance as well.
That is certainly not down to the 10 wrestlers - two women, two old men, and six jeromekeys. They do their very best to make the choreographed sequences of holds, throws, takedowns, suplexes, falls, rolls, somersaults and other acrobatic feats look fantastically spectacular. Nor is it down to the efforts of Pohjonen, who gets an imposing and disorienting bucket of noise conjured from his instrument, rousing the wrestlers with his music like a demonic dunce cum puppeteer.
The big problem with Accordion Wrestling is that the show doesn't really have that much going for it. Apart from the spectacular tossing and turning, that is. The wrestlers wrestle to the sounds of Pohjonen. And after a power struggle, they eventually adopt his music. That's it.
Here and there, the action is interrupted by a voiceover from an interview with a bunch of old-guard wrestlers, who talk about the good old days. These are interesting, as they give an insight into the history of this unusual Finnish fusion of Art and Fighting. So comes the story of the first female wrestlers, and how, after a period of suspicion by the men, they were eventually seen as full training partners.
Accordion Wrestling would have been a lot more interesting if more documentary-like passages like this had been woven in. Or if, by way of contrast, real actors or dancers had played alongside the wrestlers, to make the game scenes a bit more on point. Now the performance mainly lingers on the level of a clever act. A very spectacular act. That is.
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