WHEN Legs on the Wall, the 21-year-old Australian troupe, created this exploration of family life 10 years ago it must have looked pretty extraordinary.
With its combination of circus skills, dance, music and text it remains an impressive and sometimes exhilarating evocation of complex yet familiar emotional truths. Now, though, with physical theatre an area so rich in innovation, its power to startle is somewhat diminished. This anniversary production of All of Me, directed by Debra Iris Batton who played the role of Rose when the piece was first conceived, looks rather like a cross between the work of Frantic Assembly and one of any number of today’s artful cirques.
The performance takes the form of a number of snapshots from the interwoven existence of Mum Rose (Alexandra Harrison), Dad Mick (Brendan Shelper), daughter Elizabeth (Zanette Clements) and son Daniel (Jesse Scott). It begins with the birth of Elizabeth, as Clements, curled foetus-like, dangles from a trapeze. Below, Mum cries out in agony as she brings her daughter into the world. Her cries are an alarming omen: we watch as Elizabeth’s introduction into the family unit produces not only tenderness but also tension and finally tragedy.
Against a soundscape by Peter Kennard that is by turns lyrical and percussive, the four performers express nuances of feeling through movement that is often as exciting to watch as it is eloquent. The closeness that develops between Elizabeth and her father is conveyed through Clements flinging herself through the air and into Shelper’s arms, hurtling at him across the stage, from platforms or from the upper rungs of ladders. Her demands for his attention grow more insistent, and Freudian undertones are hinted at. Mum becomes dangerously neglected as her relationship with a man whose role as husband and lover now takes second place to that of father. Meanwhile, sibling rivalry develops between daddy’s girl and Daniel, who finds himself marginalised by Elizabeth’s arrival but who nevertheless exhibits, through myriad tiny gestures of brotherly concern, his love for her.
The brief sections of spoken text, written by Mary Morris, add little to a picture in which the characters are broadly drawn. But there is a highly charged, visceral thrill and a forceful universality to the way in which the push and pull of intimate connection is here literal as well as metaphorical. It may no longer seem cutting-edge, but All of Me can still take your breath away.
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Touring to March 19