Beyond: Circa Contemporary Circus
Opera House, until March 16
Brisbane-based Beyond is an incredibly engaging, funny, family-friendly show that had the capacity opening night audience on their feet and cheering.
Company director Yaron Lifschitz presents a genre/ gender-bending, highly skilled production that is refreshingly light-hearted.
Bridie Hooper, Gerramy Marsden, Rudi Mineur, Kathryn O’Keeffe, Paul O’Keeffe, Skip Walker-Milne and Billie Wilson-Coffey are the seven multi-talented performers whose warm-hearted joie de vivre reaches out and embraces everyone – at times quite literally.
The format and set with its three brocade-covered rostra, silver poles and red crushed-velvet curtains hint at fairground booths, vaudeville and cabaret. It is comprised mainly of acrobatics, tumbling and aerial work, all tossed off with a lightness and humour that belie highly-trained skills. And mercifully, it’s a juggling-free zone.
An eclectic soundtrack, which includes classical music, cabaret standards from Sinatra and Nat King Cole, and even Johnny Rotten, is cleverly used to lift or lower the mood.
There is no story to Beyond, but there is a theme. Lifschitz has described it as being about the relationships between our inner and outer lives, our inner animals and our outer humans.
Throughout the show, in a nice twist that would make animal-rights activists proud, large white rabbit and possum masks and a bear suit substitute for the real things. The madcap moment when the cast let loose their inner animal and Hooper clambers all over the audience, brought the house down.
Men and women’s roles are effortlessly interchanged. Hooper is an original and quirky contortionist and her blindfolded pole balance was outstanding. Marsden takes “Anyone for Tennis” to new heights or is that depths Wilson-Coffey’s silk work mesmerises and Walker-Milne in an over-large bear suit delighted. It takes great skill to be this good at looking this bad!
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