Review: I Want to Touch You (Adelaide Fringe)
Words By Ngoc Lan Tran
No trickery, just touch.
Genre: Circus and physical theatre
Presented by: Gravity and other Myths, and Nu Article
Venue: The Boboli, Garden of Unearthly Delights
Length: 1 hour
Featuring the jazzy sonic boom of Nu Article, eight fearless, charismatic, and gravity-defying acrobats from the company of Gravity and Other Myths transcends the ordinary palm-to-palm, nose-to-nose, or cheek-to-cheek, into an awe-inspiring and thought-provoking performance.
I Want to Touch You reminds us of different kinds of touch, but it also shows us how touch is complicated. With a simple flick of a wrist, it can be a childish game between eight athletic muscular adults. But with a turn of a shoulder or a force of a heel, it is a reckoning force that sets a body on a trajectory to land half way across the stage.
Sometimes, no touch can move or sway us, no matter how hard we try, or in this case, how flexible and balanced these performers can be.
A touch can also be incredibly supportive. It elevates us, and it surrounds us. This makes the most memorable moment of the show, at least for me, the one devoid of anything usually seen in traditional circus. A performer breaks off half way through with an agenda to remind the audience that we aren’t really living in a world deprived of contact. We touch via ear — centred on the beats and soundwaves of Nu Article. We touch via sight — one looking at another looking at each other (or when said performer was blinded by theatre lights, she was still ‘touched’ by the audience’s presence). Finally, we touch via air — from the air that we breathe out and in, to the particles that illuminate the stage and the light reflected in our eyes.
Walking away from I Want to Touch You is an elated and grand feeling of connectedness with our deeply rooted human desire to bond with one another. The show doesn’t hide the limits of physical contact, but more effectively it enables the heights of its emotional experience and knowledge of what it can do.
