Peacock Theatre, London
May 31, 2024
The chairs are back. The apples are back. The maths is back. The choreography is back. The teapots are back.
Put simply, add together precision, efficiency and fluency, and the result is seamless juggling and a jolly good evening.
Funny and inventive, featuring nine jugglers, 100 red apples and an eclectic soundtrack that runs from Tammy Wynette to Bach, Smashed sees directors Sean Gandini and Kati Ylä-Hokkala take elements of Pina Bausch’s style and gestural choreography, and combine them with fabulous solo and ensemble juggling.
Photo Ryoko Uyama
The art is not in not dropping items but in choreographing the dropping into the routine. Smashed is Gandini light. It’s barely an hour, but sixty minutes in which those apples, symbols of coupling and love, form the main prop. But the company are not content with being superb jugglers. There’s a lot of movement skills and comedic flair too, comedy that requires precise timing just as juggling requires precision and rhythm.
There is something Magritte-like in the incongruity of besuited men juggling apples and something hypnotic about absorbing the rhythmic slap as the little globes hit flesh and fly through the air, then seem to hang suspended until required to be caught again. Do jugglers have a faster flicker fusion rate than the rest of the population? Do they rehearse with metronomes? How long does it take to gain the precision to know exactly how much effort to put into lobbing fruit in the air so that it seems inevitable that it will be caught again?
Now that variety is all but gone, it’s wonderful to see juggling to come in from the big top and the street and grace our theatres. But, however impressive it is, it would be dull without the context and massive effort that Gandini put into lighting, costumes, choreography, music and the conveying of the relationships between the people on stage. Each one of the nine strong company has an opportunity to establish their character as the apples circle and swoop, rise and get caught.
Oh yes, and so do the teapots. The last laugh is on us though. No chance of watching this performance in the hope that anything will be dropped, after all it is called Smashed.