Gandini, Juggling, and Heka
With other prestigious juggling troupes, the spectacle tends to depend on what’s being juggled: teapots and/or knives and/or bottles - as opposed to the balls and hoops being thrown, spun, and caught by less ambitious troupes. Gandini Juggling has juggled teapots in its time, but it apparently never loses the innocent bliss of juggling at its purest (often with, yes, balls and hoops. And it also keeps experimenting with taking juggling itself where it has not been before: what we can call Juggling Plus.
In the Phelim McDermott production of the Philip Glass “Akhnaten”, the double marvel was that group juggling became musical, very felicitously married to the ostinati of Glass’s score, and that it became a metaphor for the precarious but beautiful achievement of Akhnaten’s civilisation. Musical juggling becomes, with the Gandinis, a miraculous feat: I would love to see them pursue it with the music of other composers. Instead, we’ve learnt that they love to trace connections to choreography that’s not seriously tied to music. “Smashed” (with teapots) was the Gandini tribute to Pina Bausch; “LIFE” was theirs to Merce Cunningham. (They’re said also to be drawn to the work of Trisha Brown.) In “Smashed”, juggling became a perfect metaphor for the absurdism that’s basic to the Bausch view. In “LIFE”, juggling became part of the beautifully complex changefulness that characterises all Cunningham’s work.
The latest Gandini offering, “Heka,” opened at The Place on January 30. Here juggling becomes part of a sustained demonstration of trompe-l’oeil illusion. (“Heka” is the Ancient Egyptian deity of magic: probably this latest work is connected in Gandini thought patterns with the Egyptian culture that was so gorgeously evoked in “Akhnaten”.) How many hands do you see? How many legs? Whose hands and whose legs? How did that hoop fly in thjat route? What’s left unseen here?
The Gandini performers and manner have immense charm, even sweetness. “Heka” took them into areas of illusion I had not seen them enter before; it’s easy to love them throughout their performing. Since I want to go on loving them, I’ll just say that “Heka” on opening night gave me less to love than the previous Gandini shows of my experience. They may build on it until it becomes one of their classics. Or they may draw from it when they compose a later, greater piece. Everything about it shows that Gandini Juggling means to keep developing. Onward!
February 13, 2025