The Very Best of the Edinburgh Festivals 2024
Review: Assembly Hall
Review: Orchestra of Sound
Review: After the Silence
Published 08 Aug 2016
There's a kind of David Bowie ring to the title of Gandini Juggling's new show. And it chimes through their whole performance, too, from the alien circle of lights onstage, like the beam of a lo-fi lunar landing craft, to the images of his face on the three jugglers' psychedelic tunics.
These lightly-worn influences heighten the ethereal quality of the company's work. Brightly coloured batons soar through the air, falling like catkins, or climbing so fast they become a blurred beam of pure colour. Gandini heighten the hallucinogenic qualities of their juggling with a fuzzy, trippy soundtrack – and there's not a single skipped beat.
The music rings through the vast space, a former church with bemused stone cherubs looking down on the stage; Gandini have thoughtfully kitted them out with party hats. There are plenty more moments of gentle whimsy. Sometimes, two jugglers will duet as the odd one out amuses himself with a more prosaic kind of task: doing star jumps, or making a meticulous tray of fresh lemonade. Then they attack each other with sticky tape, pinning limbs together as batons drop, and chaos takes over their beautifully ordered world. Biscuits, water bottles and a storm of rings fly through the air: you can juggle with anything, their mute proficiency says.
But through the chaos, we never lose a sense of juggling's power to mesmerise – or of the alien beauty of flying foreign objects on interlocking trajectories, tracing invisible ellipses through the air.