Chapter 262: One Fell Swoop - By a Thread

David Monteith-Hodge

 

What can you do with 30 metres of rope?

The first image that springs to mind is a tug of war. Childhood rivalry, school sports day, one side takes a tumble. At National Circus I came to associate rope with an uncompromising aerial discipline. It doesn't really give you a break, like a trapeze bar could, and I found myself in a constant fight with gravity. It was exhausting. Then, after two years sailing to Australia, rope makes me think of life on a boat: coils on deck, lines running through pulleys, the quick exchange of shouted instructions when something needs hauling, lowering or securing. The knowledge that one wrong move can have disastrous consequences. So I was intrigued by the idea of a show built entirely around it, and curious to see what One Fell Swoop would do with it.

I liked the name as well, By a Thread. Well, that's what life feels like at the moment. But this isn't some maudlin reflection on being on the edge. It is much more curious than that.

I had a small preview, in a sense, on the way to the theatre. On the Tube I spotted a dad in a bucket hat and dark glasses, lugging a suitcase and carrying a curly-mopped toddler on his hip. I played peekaboo with the child on the platform and later, when he started crying on the Tube, offered, via his dad, a red-and-white striped juggling ball with a smiley face on. It was accepted so gratefully that I gave him the other two, with their funny expressions, for good measure, and hopped off feeling inexplicably lighter.

I arrived at Jacksons Lane in the nick of time. “Welcome back to Circus, Lu!” was the line thrown to me as I took a seat next to Angus, still reeling after a Bon Jovi concert the night before. I was back where I belong.

The show opens with a familiar piano piece, repetitive and oddly settling. I couldn’t place it at first, then it clicked: Philip Glass - I wrote about Tao of Glass after seeing it twice this summer. Then, from nowhere, a body comes flying across the stage on the rope with a whoop, breaking that spell, and the music gives way to playful strings.

At first the rope is almost modest.Three performers hold it taut while another crosses it like a slackline, their hands constantly adjusting the tension beneath her feet. When she reaches the other side, a hand reaches out to meet hers. Then the rope changes again. It hangs in three sides of a rectangle. A body suspended between the vertical lines becomes a platform. A three-high rises from the floor, and suddenly the flyers are climbing higher, each grabbing a rope before dropping into a catch.

What started as a length of rope quickly becomes something far more inventive: a cloud swing, a bungee, a Spanish web, a Chinese pole, a treadmill balance. Familiar circus disciplines are dismantled and rebuilt around the collective. There is no hidden rigger making the machinery work behind the scenes. We see exactly how it happens. Hands pull the rope down. Bodies counterbalance. Someone has to ground. Someone has to fly.

And the strength this demands is extraordinary. It isn't just the person in the air doing the spectacular bit. The people basing are working just as hard, hauling, holding and controlling the rope while someone else climbs, swings or flies. I kept thinking, surely they must be doing twice the work? And then they did it again. These guys are virtuosos on the strings.

“Basing. Flying. Hup.” The show has its own physical grammar, built from things that sound deceptively simple: hold, pull, climb, catch. And the performers clearly know which job they'd rather be doing. Nobody wants to be the one still hauling the rope, doing the grunt work.

“Climbing, basing, yup, coming down. Hurry up Nina. Ah, not yet. Ugh. Still basing.”

I loved the cheeky competitive one-upmanship as they bring each other down in order to clamber up themselves, and the way they gradually emerge as characters as they call each other by name. Ellie’s bounce, Easa's glorious sulk, particularly after his declaration on rope “I am beautiful”, strutting around, a leisurely examination of his nails while everyone else is flailing and needing his help, made me laugh. A neck hang produces the immediate response, “That doesn't look very safe,” before a squabble ends with one performer accidentally swept up in a foot hang like a sprung trap.

Photo: Moving Platform Photography

Then the mood changes.

Charice comes out of the wings hauling straps behind her, attached to the rope  as though dragging some invisible weight. The music turns dissonant. The playful rhythm disappears and suddenly there is an urgency to the pulling. The strain is visible. The effort is palpable. The straps become an extension of the rope, and the pulling segues into the most effortless, beautiful flight.

Photo: Ambrose Kelso

Later, Radiohead's Spectre accompanies a haunting solo. Easa climbs the rope with something almost painful in the movement, hauling himself upwards until he reaches the end of his tether. Another performer appears and the solo quietly becomes a duet, the two bodies beginning to mirror each other.

And then the rope becomes almost childlike again.

It turns into a giant cat's cradle in the background. They skip with it. They make knots. They swing from it, climb it and disappear into it. There is something of the playground energy in the way they keep testing what it will allow them to do, except the playground is six metres in the air and nobody has forgotten the physics.

That is where the show is at its most beguiling. The danger is real. There is no safety wrist loop to secure Jonathan at the top of the rope as he is spun round in Spanish web. But so is the play. The performers clearly know exactly what they are doing. There is something magical about watching a body suddenly appear somewhere you weren't expecting a body to be.

There is a later duet between Jonathan and Charice, the founders and creators of the show. I was completely taken in by the tenderness between them, to the point that the romantic in me found myself checking afterwards, “Please tell me they are a couple,” as though I would have been cheated if they weren't.

Photo: Sean Breadsell

They are. And that deep and steady partnership has shaped the whole show.

Other points I loved were the application of chalk on the chest as a precursor to Cassia balancing there rather than on Latonya's shoulders, and the final act, in which the theme is brought home as all the cast are inverted and the rope is passed from foot to foot in a line. Not everyone has grown up on their hands, as Ellie appears to have done, and so there are moments when the rope is dropped. But that only seems to create more camaraderie and goodwill from the audience. Someone slips. Someone else catches them. We've got you. They all end up connected. 

Photo: Ambrose Kelso

I was delighted to learn afterwards that Jonathan had grown up sailing, and that they bought the rope with Charice from a shipbuilder's yard, then borrowed a couple of pulleys from the circus school in Melbourne and began experimenting. Jonathan's background in rigging and engineering makes sense of the show's extraordinary balance between physics and poetry. I love that it has grown organically from those first experiments over the past nine years. And that they regularly play board games all together on tour as well. A staple of family life and our ocean crossings on La Cigale, along with the “peg game” introduced by a Kiwi sailing friend. Great to find that's a shared language too.

Suddenly the rope made sense to me in another way.

On a boat, rope is never simply rope. It is an extension of the crew. It runs through your hands and connects you to something happening somewhere else. Pull here and something moves there. Ease the tension and the whole system changes. You learn the names of the lines, the knots, the pulleys, but what matters most is knowing when to hold and when to let go. And that camaraderie pulls you into the game.

Watching By a Thread, I realised I had been watching something I already knew without quite recognising it. The language was different, but the principle was the same. Seven people working a system in which every movement depends on somebody else's movement.

And perhaps that is why the show stayed with me. It doesn't need to tell us that we need one another, to depend on, to have fun with. We can see it.

Every time somebody flies, somebody else is holding the rope.

Photo: David Monteith-Hodge

Post-script: 

Before the show started, there was an announcement that photography with flash was permitted. But words are my thing.

Only sometimes I drop the thread, and words let me down. Especially when caught off guard for a post-show audience soundbite.

I nearly died when I saw it published, and me first up. “Creative, joyful and sexy” were the three words enthusiastically introducing the vox pop for One Fell Swoop on a Jacksons Lane reel. 

Sexy?!

There is something very different about saying a word spontaneously into a microphone and then seeing yourself first up on a reel broacast publicly on Instagram and Facebook. Suddenly I felt like I sounded like some sort of overexcited circus voyeur and was grateful that a photo of someone else was at least used for the cover, preserving my modesty.

So let's be clear, I wasn't talking about sexy in the Sydney Sweeney sense. I mean the cheeky way One Fell Swoop engage with the audience, and each other, and that physical connection conveyed through insane strength, ridiculous skill, tenderness and playful energy.

The Tao of Rope. The Shibari of Intimacy. 

That's what makes it sexy. And it was joyful. And creative. So, fair cop. I stand by my words.

Photo: David Monteith-Hodge

  

Directors: Charice Rust and Jonathan Morgan

Dramaturg: Zebastian Hunter

Cast: Cassia Jamieson, Charice Rust, Easa Min-Swe, Ellie Grow, Jonathan Morgan, Latonya Wiggington, Nina Robertson

Technician: And a special shout-out to Winter Chapman, whose circus background, musicianship and technical ear bring the sound and lighting together in a way I found particularly striking. I loved meeting her and hearing how she brings those worlds together.