There is, to the left of the computer where this review is being written, an orange. One of the fifty, maybe sixty oranges that are used in Smashed2 of juggling balls. A survivor who did not end up like her sisters and the seven squashed watermelons in the final on the stage. After a stint at the Diamant in Quebec, the Gandini Juggling group from Great Britain, a regular in Montreal who is completely circus, opened the festival with their show with a vintage and swing tone, which pays a (too?) clear homage to Pina Bausch.
Seven women in little black dresses and two men in suits and ties with slicked-back hair form a marching line, juggling and making cute little steps of chorus girlsswing era. We immediately recognize the Pina Bausch inspiration in this well-crafted beginning.
Juggling allows you to inhabit and give rhythm, through the orange dots which rise and fall, to the entire space of the stage sky, with a unique lightness and liveliness.
Usually, to dance up there, you need lifts or sets, or, like in the circus, apparatus, which are visually and technically heavier.
The music follows one after the other, strongly evocative — of old swing, of Roy Orbison, of opera, of Ennio Morricone of The good, the bad and the ugly.
Almost all the tableaux are collective: the work is done in teams, almost always in a line or in small subgroups. This allows the public to see excellent artists at work who shine rather as links in a chain – something that is rarely seen in the circus, where the spectacular, solar and soloist presence is valued.
The performers are solid. The show is well-rehearsed. Some scenes are strong—the “human machine to create a juggler,” for example. But the directors, Sean Gandini and Kati Ylä-Hokkala, wear out their effects. The same human machine, gently remade around Yu-Hsien Wu, then no longer works.
The succession of music ends up resembling a playlist laborious on emotion. The homage to Pina Bausch looks like imitation, without reinvention. The eye tires of lines and subgroups, of repetitions of form.
In the balls
“ Dance ! ” shouts Francesca Poppi Mari in the first part of the show, at the end of her mocking solo. “ Dance! It’s a dance show! “However, there is ultimately little choreography here. We work with just a few movements, both individual and collective. The space is little explored, little composed. The choice to avoid any formal use of balls – we think of the work done with ping-pong in Speed Glueby Simon Grenier-Poirier and Dorian Nuskind-Oder — cuts off a lot of possibilities.
Smashed2 also offers a strange feminism. Seven women, two men: yet we only see them, and even if their roles are those of oafs, they are more present and more defined than those of the women.
In the final part, when the performers launch into savagery and explosion, the liberation and enjoyment that could arise in the spectator do not follow. What is staged as a vengeful bacchanal re-proposes a reading of hysteria that is too easy – because of the hiatus in writing.
It’s clearly not because we mime kicks in the balls or talk about menstruation that we’re getting rid of patriarchy, especially when we’ve previously left the most solid and present roles to men all along.
Smashed2 is a sequence of Smashed (2010), made with apples, which was widely circulated. Of this first opus, the criticism of the Guardian Lyn Gardner said in 2012: “The show seems to need a greater variety of rhythms and tones to sustain interest over time, even if there are plenty of touches of irony.”
While next to the computer there is only the peel and the smell of orange, like that which emanated from the stage yesterday when the spectators left, one is surprised that exactly the same criticisms also apply to Smashed2. The roots of the work are interesting. Gandini Juggling would benefit from maturing his stage writing, which collapses over the course of the play by making do with easy options, however effective they may be.