‘Create Circus like music’ seems to be the motto of Skye Gellman for his unusual acrobatic project. Snow consists in designing a new world where our orderly perceptions are thrown away. After seven years of touring throughout Australia and Europe, the artist presents his fifth and final show in Melbourne, taking the roots of traditional circus in order to deconstruct them and reinvent a whole different universe.
When the audience enters the Melba Spiegeltent, a big top in the end of Johnston St, the performer gives them earplugs, with as an only explanation ‘Ringing ears are the new soundtrack’ written on paper. Approximately twenty people stand in the room, most of them by pair, and you can feel than no one has an idea of what to expect. But we all goes with it, by curiosity at least to enters this immersive experience through the brushed paper we have to tear apart. As Narnia’s world, the frontier to the new dimension has been crossed.
Each performance is unique, and as instructions for the audience are written on paper, everyone feels free to do whatever they want with it. Indeed, Gellmann tries to play on the unexplainable and it works. A large part of the public is puzzled by this unique approach to the world of circus and acrobatics.
Although we fear that we don’t fully get the point of all of this, we have to admit than there is an interesting work on the use of space. The tent is separated between different areas and objects that the performer is going to use. Standing on a champaign bottle or spinning on a bowling ball and falling repetitively, he is exposed and naked, in every sense of the term. As if he wanted to be without any artifices, truly to his show. Playing on the bizarre, he tries to disrupt our senses. Most definitely a new version of the traditional circus.
This imperfection is touching in a way, although a bit disturbing in its lack of sense. The audience doesn’t really know what to do, but enjoys being free of moving in the big space, having all the power on their actions and perceptions. We can walk around the room, sit, deciding to take part of the show or not. Everyone can interpret it at his own manner. And the point of it is that even few people know each other, they still feel connected, living the same weird and inexplicable experience.
The obvious attempt of surprising and chocking the public works. And a certain beauty is shown through the distortions of Gellman’s body during his rope figures. At times we feel a bit lost in the show, asking ourselves why do we do a snowball paper fight in the middle of the performance for instance. But then, if we refer to the title of the piece, it leaves our brains wonders on its symbolic. Moreover we feel that this is what the artist wants – to put us in a state of in between, beyond the understanding of normal things, in an all other world. And this surreal and abstract piece opens up new horizons in our minds, leaving us a little bit more clueless about the world around us.
