Theatre: Backbone
Backbone
14-19 August 2018, Southbank Centre, London
A show from Australia that is easy to love
The light dawns slowly on bodies and what appear to be scaffold poles strewn across the stage. There’s also a rail of clothes. Have they fallen asleep in rehearsal? And why is one of the guys wearing a dress? And then they bring out the buckets of dirt…
But then... wow! Amazing acrobatics that take your breath away with the precision, timing and strength. Geoff Cobham's extraordinary lighting design creates intimate spaces including circles and squares and corridors, while at other times there is a golden, unmistakeably Australian light. And the live music responds to the tension of the human structures on the stage, or is it the other way around? Very soon I am even enjoying the dirt – is it really dirt or is it some sort of high performance magic theatrical dust that allows for superior traction? I want to sneak down to the stage after the show and touch it.
There are seven male performers to three women (and the two musicians are also male), yet this never feels like a macho display of stunts. It is always playful. In one scene, performers are skidding through the dirt into a handstand, wow. Then they take turns to run towards another and kick them, martial arts style with both feet, into the dirt. And they swap clothes. Always playful.
My favourite scene is when they take the woman with white hair and intense gaze and shift and rotate her, limb by limb, element by element. While this happens to her, she contorts and readjusts so that she never looses sight of us, the audience. Her body must resolve itself so that she is still watching, her gaze is fixed.
I never did work out why the guy was wearing a dress at the beginning, nor why two of them were wearing dresses later in the show. It just seemed… natural. Naturally playful, like the entire show. I loved all of it. Even the buckets of dirt.
The Australian rugby team like you have never seen them before?
Photo credit: Carnival Cinema
Corridors of light and southern hemisphere warmth
Photo credit: Carnival Cinema