Nine chairs are lined up on stage seating seven men and two women who begin a half-hour gravity-defying and crazily graceful dance. Are they dancing jugglers or juggling dancers? Juggling actors or acting jugglers? Smashed is the perfect combination of these three disciplines. This play in parts explores conflict, lost love, seduction, relational tensions and quaint afternoon tea in a series of vibrant twirling scenes full of nostalgia, revolt and lost innocence that offer a virtuoso and burlesque tribute to the choreography of Pina Bausch.
With aesthetics reflecting a 1950s cinematographic style, and music ranging from the romantic country tunes of Tammy Wynette to Bach, together with Brenda Lee, The Ink Spots and The Charioteers, the fruit waltzes, whirls, and speeds towards the fateful teatime hour. In the totally subjective world of Sean Gandini and Kati Ylä-Hokkala and the fine balance of the virtuoso technique, reality is subverted by melancholic or jokey, bad-tempered or swaggering moods, until the catharsis of an unmissable celebratory ending.
Gandini’s Juggling’s piece is an elegant and sensational, rugged and virtuoso, beautiful and wild piece that is deliberately set to be smashed, and will play twice a day at the Théâtre de Verdure (Thabor).
BIOGRAPHY
Formed in London in 1992 by Kati Yla-Hokkala and Sean Gandini to celebrate juggling in all its facets, this contemporary circus company, at first called the Gandini Juggling Project, initially explored contemporary dance with Mike Day and choreographer Gill Clarke. With the London Millennium celebrations and its creations at the London International Mime Festival, the company started to grow. Over twenty years, it has played over four thousand performances in more than forty countries, creating connections and working with artists from all disciplines and organisations around the world. Following the success of Glow (2008), a juggling show with luminous objects, and Smashed (2010), a homage to choreographer Pina Bausch, their new creation 4×4 Ephemeral Architectures explores the connections between ballet and juggling, with four jugglers and three dancers, clubs and rings under the creative eye of choreographer Alexander Whitley.
DISTRIBUTION
Conception : Sean Gandini et Kati Ylä-Hokkala.
Éclairage : Mark Jonathan.
Interprétation : Sean Gandini, Kati Ylä-Hokkala, Jon Udry, Malte Steinmetz, Niels Seidel, Kim Huynh, Iñaki Sastre, Owen Reynolds, Sakari Mannistö.
Management / production : Anne-Agathe Pri
