Fly, my beauties! Fly!
Backbone made me really, really happy in my body. Another way of saying that is that, for about the first ten minutes of the show, I was moaning and gasping and—let’s face it—talking as if I was having sex with the entire company of ten acrobats and two musicians.
With Backbone, the Australian circus troupe Gravity & Other Myths sets out to explore strength. And, as they climb up one another until there are two four-person towers on-stage—each acrobat standing on another’s shoulders—and, as they hurl each nother through space (at one point, two pairs of men swing one woman each back and forth before releasing them and sending them flying into the arms of a couple of other guys), there’s a lot of muscle power on display.
But there’s also something deeply erotic in the subtext—both in the Freudian sense that Eros is a celebration of life and in the Jungian sense (Sorry, I’m getting a bit heady) that Eros is about personal relatedness in human activities. I mean, the evening unfolds in distinct movements—there’s a whole section about rocks and weight, for instance—but nothing feels even vaguely like a solo act. And, on the fleshly level, it feels so good to witness the ease and the effort, the trust and the skill with which these gorgeous humans respond to and support one another’s bodies. Hand to head, thigh to waist, foot to foot, it’s all about charged physical contact, and who couldn’t use more of that? [Read more…]
