Urszula Dawkins spoke with Skye Gellmann about stripping back the genre to its bare bones, squatting in South Yarra, and conversing with the audience…
‘Inherently scattered’ is how Silvertree and Gellmann’s Skye Gellman describes the three creators of Scattered Tacks . But you can’t afford to be scattered as you spin on a bowling ball or do a handstand on it, or balance three juggling balls on your spine. Or perform complex acrobatics on a darkened stage with just a high-powered torch strapped onto your head. It’s long way from traditional circus – for the audience, the oohs, aahs and squeals of delight are replaced by silence on stage, held breath and a straining of all the senses. By focusing on exploring objects – on the performers’ relationships to ‘things’ – Silvertree and Gellmann have created a tense, tender and compelling vision: in Skye Gellmann’s words, “a twisted, weird circus”.
Terri Cat Silvertree, Alex Gellmann and Skye Gellmann go back a long way – Alex and Skye are brothers and all three began their circus training as children at Adelaide’s Cirkidz. Between them they’ve collected a swag of fringe festival and other awards: Skye’s Asleep in a Secret won the Best Circus (2009) and Village (2009) awards at the Melbourne Fringe; while Shuttlecock! by The Rambutan Circus Collective, of which Alex and Terri are both founders, won the Best Dance/Circus/Physical Theatre award at Adelaide Fringe 2007. Scattered Tacks , created when the three found themselves all living and working in Melbourne, won the Melbourne Fringe’s 2008 Village award, and in 2009 has toured to the Adelaide Fringe, Brisbane’s Powerhouse and the Noorderzon Performing Arts Festival in the Netherlands.
Circus it may be, but there’s no glitz and glam, no spangles or sequins – indeed, no lighting or artificial sound whatsoever. The whole point, says Skye Gellmann, is to take the form back to its essential elements: the bodies; the people performing.
“First idea,” says Gellmann: “The reality of what’s happening. Second idea: to create something that had the least amount of gratuitous elements; that was really refined back.”
“We don’t try to entertain…instead we draw attention to things other than presenting tricks as a spectacle. We’re presenting them as realities, and trying to break them down.”
Watching Scattered Tacks is less a narrative journey than an ‘experience’; a heightening of the senses that takes place often in near-total darkness. The tension that builds around the group’s ‘tricks as realities’, illuminated and fragmented by harsh beams of light, is matched by an ethereal beauty at times as the same harsh light renders skin almost translucent, glowing beneath the performers’ simple costumes.
“Scattered Tacks is about the audience’s experience more than trying to communicate a story,” says Gellmann. “It’s about the senses, it’s about sight and it’s about hearing all the little sounds and drawing attention to the tiny details, and finding the joy in those little things. It’s a very minimal show – I guess to shift perspectives is important… You have to use different senses that you don’t use in everyday life, but also your sense of what a show should be.”
This fierce reduction of theatre to bodies, objects and an intently focused audience grew out of a reaction to the ‘performing monkey’ syndrome experienced at times by individual members of the group – Skye in particular has a ‘second life’ as a corporate circus performer.
“We have things to say about the world other than ‘look at my handstand’,” he says. “So we started pulling apart circus and seeing what else it could mean, other than ‘I’m going to show you this trick’.”
The high-powered flashlights and bare staging also reflect the location in which Scattered Tacks was created: a squatted apartment block in South Yarra where the group lived, worked and rehearsed for several months – initially with no electricity, and developing a necessary affinity to “sneaking around in the dark”. Surrounded by wealthy neighbours and squeezed between a high-rise parking station and a luxury car dealer, Skye says squatting was both liberating and alienating, and bred a sense of isolation that inevitably found its way into the show.
“I see it as a kind of blessing more than anything, because we actually had a lot of space… We had a whole apartment we were using as a workshop, so we could make stuff there; we had multiple rooms that were studios.”
“It’s hard to make a show in a room though, because a room is still a room, it’s small and restricting. But because we had restrictions as well as new freedoms, it just gave us new options, and it brought new discoveries.”
Even in a traditional theatre space, there’s a strongly intimate feel to Scattered Tacks, and although ‘audience involvement’ is not an overt intention, for Skye especially, it’s a crucial, if indefinable, relationship.
“I feel like I’m having a conversation with the audience sometimes about what I think, instead of trying to just impose how the audience feels… I let them feel things…”
Silvertree and Gellmann’s manipulations of teapots, bowling balls and an onion, among other things, reflect life in the darkened apartment block, but more tellingly, the curiosity of three humans about the objects they encounter. Their relationship with the viewer is a focused and absorbing collaboration that ranges from breathtaking tension to a shared understanding of human fragility, to joy and delight. As one reviewer has commented – it will be unlike anything you’ve seen before.
Scattered Tacks
by Silvertree and Gellmann
Arts House, Meat Market
Tue 16 to Sun 21 March
For information or tickets for all Arts House shows, go to the
Arts House website
There is a dog over the alleyway which howls. I hear him a lot.
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