It’s usually very simple scenes and pictures from his own childhood that inspire Italian-Swiss Massimo Furlan’s works: the poster of a singer hanging on the wall of his sister’s room; looking forward to the Eurovision Song Contest in the seventies, or the memory of playing football alone in his room as a child while an Italian Series A match was playing on the radio. Furlan uses this as an example, to develop his legendary football theatre, in which he re-enacts historical matches in minute detail – step by step, gesture by gesture.

It is long shots like these, shots that take time, which Furlan finds for his memories to stage in very special places. In football stadiums, at the airport, sometimes in the theatre too. In this way personal anecdotes become narratives that touch the collective memory of the viewers and, in so doing, evoke something like a community of memory.

For “Gym Club” Furlan now sets out on the trail of another sporting icon from his childhood. Furlan takes Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career, which started out in a weight room in the cellar of the Liebenauer Stadium in Graz, as the background for his study of the culture of bodybuilding. To him, rather than weightlifting, bodybuilding is about body work, bodily transformation, whose true aim is an aesthetic one. The contests are not about demonstrating physical strength, but beauty, a choreography of muscles and bodies trained to perfection. The scene in “Gym Club”: a going-away party at a fitness club, funfair atmosphere, a burlesque situation. The members have come to celebrate a man who will make it further than all of them on his road to becoming a star. The feverish hunt for beauty and power lies ahead of him. A boundless dream.

Regie: Massimo Furlan
Dramaturgie: Claire de Ribeaupierre
Technik: Antoine Friderici
Technik: Philippe de Rham
Kostüme: Cécile Delanoe
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Julie Monot
Schauspielerin / Schauspieler: Diane Decker
Schauspielerin / Schauspieler: Anne Delahaye
Schauspielerin / Schauspieler: Massimo Furlan
Schauspielerin / Schauspieler: Laurent Gachoud
Schauspielerin / Schauspieler: Francois Karlen
Schauspielerin / Schauspieler: Stéphane Vecchione

Mediathek