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Adelaide Fringe 2015

A Simple Space

Gravity & Other Myths

Genre: Circus

Venue: Royal Croquet Club - The Menagerie

Festival:


Low Down

An utterly brilliant display of physical agility, strength and precision, from a tight group of performers whose bounces, balances and backflips drop jaws, take breath and make us roar with delight.

Review

It’s as if you’re relaxing at a barbecue on a weekend afternoon: it’s too hot to do much more than sit and watch, and here are these eight friends larking about in front of you. They’re falling and catching and jumping and throwing – not balls, not clubs: each other – and you don’t know where to look in their freneticism.

Someone is always vying for the longest or fastest, and if a blur of motion isn’t the winner, it’s the one doing it upside down. Yet there remains complete teamwork – when the 40 degree heat makes their hands a little sweaty, the occasional slip is backed up by two or three of the others. These people are having a great time together – and we’re along for the ride.

The team not only engage us, the audience, but involve us in their acrobatics – cheeky, knowing looks at you as they’re about to jump, or them leaving their platform to come out into where we’re sitting on the edge of our seats. The occasional “no way” from the woman behind me started as a whisper, but she got louder, and more frequent, with the truly amazing gravity defying acts that these people make look so easy.

The title of this show is apt only in the description of where this group performs – a square, surrounded on three sides by the captivated audience, the fourth being a raised stage for the percussionist, who throughout the acrobatics of the other seven, plays the beats live (mostly on his drum kit, sometimes equally great on his body). The lighting is simple – a member of the team will push a button to change it subtly, but only to focus on where the action is: on the ground, up high, up really high. The space is indeed simple, but what these eight supremely talented people do with it is a breathtaking spectacle and enormous fun.

I’m going again.

Published