Review: A Simple Space at The Pleasure Garden

A Simple Space at Aurora Spiegeltent at The Pleasure Garden
Sunday, January 19, 2025

Seven performers, one drummer, minimal lighting, and a rapt audience united in awe. This was the core of A Simple Space, a circus presented by Adelaide’s Gravity and Other Myths, or GOM to their friends. Despite the show having premiered in 2013 as one of GOM’s first productions and constantly touring internationally ever since, there was still a freshness and an almost delicious rawness to this particular evening.

Part of that rawness may have been due to the structure of the show. From the very first moments, there was a frenetic energy shared by the artists and a series of acrobatic challenges between themselves, which likely had different results each performance. This section was almost a warmup session to what was to come, all the while extremely entertaining in its own right. No one was holding either their ability or their competitive streak back.

Having a live drummer at the back of the stage meant that the music could react in real time to what happened in front of the audience. An example—when a performer tapped out of an act or routine, the music slowed and readjusted as much as the remaining artists did in the physical space itself. This would not have been possible with a pre-recorded set—again, an indication of the visceral newness inherent in each performance.

The overall sound design for the show was powerful and could be split into three distinct portions. Firstly, a driving, kinetic percussion when what happened on stage was extremely busy, with multiple points of interest that jostled for the audience’s attention. Second, primarily piano or other keyboards, when things slowed down, aural water droplets that lightly touched the brain in the softest ASMR fashion.

Thirdly, and probably most impactfully, when there was no music or sound at all, as the entire audience held its breath, the entire speigeltent focused on the artists’ light suggestions, instructions, calls, and responses to each other. There was almost an absolute purity to these moments, with all mystery and artifice stripped away, before an explosion of applause, the music beginning lightly again for the next cycle.

The feats of agility and strength were many, varied, and jaw-dropping. To warm up, the performers fell backwards dozens of times in the first few minutes of the show, caught by each other—mostly. At another point, a trio of artists used each other as climbing frames and negotiated the terrain from the ground to a degree of fully upright, with touch contact never broken. Perhaps the splits five metres in the air, or the jumps across ever-increasing distances at various levels of height, were more astonishing. These few highlighted acts were a mere scratch of the surface across the show’s entirety.

The fragility and lumpy imperfections of the human body were rendered moot as the artists made each other seemingly as flat as the Nullarbor, as light as a hummingbird, and as precision-timed as the best atomic clock. The entire performance was almost entirely accomplished without circus equipment—indeed, the only piece used was both assembled and dismantled within a few minutes directly on stage for one admittedly spectacular act.

A Simple Space was achingly beautiful, both as a circus and as a performance art, worthy of every accolade it had already gained and no doubt will receive in the future. Almost effortlessly, it is one of the easiest recommendations for an absolute must-see at this season’s Fringe World.

PAUL MEEK