Bounce is a Swedish Street Dance Company whose production Insane in the Brain is a take on Ken Kesey‘s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which I’ve reviewed here).

Plot:
The daily routine of the patients in a mental institution is disrupted when a new patient gets there – Randle McMurphy. He leads the patients into rebellion but ultimately pays a high price for it.

Insane in the Brain is pretty damn amazing and didn’t get nearly the attention in Austria it deserves. Even though there were some squabbles I had with it, altogether it is well worth to see.

[Spoilers]

Coming into the hall, I was really surprised at how empty it was. – They had closed off a third of the seats and even the remaining 2/3s were only half full. I would have thought that the show would attract more people. In hindsight, though, I think that the target audience would have been mostly young people and for them to go to the show the tickets were waaaaay to expensive. I really wanted to go, but I wouldn’t have gone either if my parents hadn’t decided to invite me.

The show lasts about 90 minutes and there’s no break. This took me by surprise for two reasons: 1. It must have been fucking exhausting to do, especially since most of the dancers were on stage basically the entire time. 2. Time just flew by. I felt like we were barely sitting when the light went on again.

There was hardly any dialogue and I don’t know whether people would exactly understand the ending (and where it was coming from) if they hadn’t known already anyway. I mean, in the book the lobotomy was foreshadowed all the time, in this performance not so much. But I freely admit that in this case it wasn’t really that important.

The dancing was superb and the choreography great. It surprises me again and again what creative combinations come out of the HipHop/Street Dance movement. And it’s always amazing how much it fits.
Also, the music they chose was pretty cool and there was a bunch of stuff that wasn’t HipHop. (Especially their rendition of Maniac was really awesome.)

There were a couple of things that bothered me, though. Actually, it’s one thing that splits into two issues: They conflated Chief Bromden and one of the “vegetables” so Chief Bromden became a guy in a wheelchair who seemingly has nothing more wrong with him than that he doesn’t really talk much.
First issue: the loss of CB’s point of view.
Second issue: By combining these two characters into one, CB sometimes needed to get out of the wheelchair. I was so disappointed when he did that the first time because I thought that they had actually included a disabled person in a dance show. I was like “wow! what an amazing opportunity to do this and to show that a wheelchair doesn’t mean you can’t dance and woo-hoo!” And then he gets up. *le sigh*

Apart from that, though, the show was a feast for eyes and ears and I can only recommend you go and see it.