Smashed

It begins to the gramophone crackle of Little Jack Little’s earworm ‘I Always Wanted to Waltz in Berlin’, as the nine Gandini performers juggle apples and fix us with bland, elusive stares. It’s sepia-toned and dripping in nostalgia, but the song’s casual allusions to wartime bombing stick a dagger into the act’s innocent surface.

It’s this delicious disruption, this twinning of the charming and urbane with the threatening and apocalyptic which makes ‘Smashed’ an arresting piece of theatre as well as an adroit evening of juggling.

There’s pure pleasure in the widescreen spectacle of Gandini tossing apples back and forth in restless gravity-defying arcs, and belly laughs in their attempts to foil one another’s performances. The influence of German choreographer Pina Bausch is felt strongly in the structure of short vignettes which build fluently from a series of surprisingly mature and probing themes. Gandini’s approach to juggling allows the thrown object to represent a range of abstract concepts and emotional states – the apples become tokens of impotency or virility or objects of unattainable desire. One uncomfortable moment sees a female performer ‘birth’ the fruit on to the laps of the nervous males, while the only other woman stands motionless, head bowed sorrowfully, in the shadowed corner of the stage.

Gandini’s theme here is mischievously oblique, but as the apples are swapped for teacups and graceful catches switched for splats and crashes, things take a decidedly dark turn. Racism, misogyny and the shadow of National Socialism have all been tossed into the air before the evening is over, and while Gandini are happy to leave us guessing, it’s clear there’s a lot more going on here than a load of old balls.