From the very beginning, this had danger attached. It’s thrilling, it’s exciting and it is so theatrical that I wondered if they could do workshops on how to do scene changes for other companies. There is nothing particularly new or radical here, but they have taken an idea and packaged it into an hour's worth of high-octane jeopardy.
The theatricality comes not just with the interaction with the audience—including where they have one young person come up to draw for their physical Chinese Whispers, or the warm-up which asks for styles from the audience—but a knowledge of how to hold onto their audience by introducing technique, developing a movement and another piece of work using that technique until a climax where we see the limits of that technique and how that has tested them. It’s layered.
It is not without fault, however, and one of the most appealing things about this are the mistakes—they have turned it into a game. We have attempts at tumbles and balances, some of which work and others which do not. A score is tallied, and by the end, they have more success than failure, and this is to remind us: this is hard.
The beginning is great—back to that thrill of danger—because we see people three high, walking across each other’s shoulders, falling safely down, landing safely and increasing the gasp quotient as they do it. It leads into the fun of a warm-up, where one performer gives us their standard warm-up, then they are told to do it again with feeling before doing it with a jazz feel, before the audience are asked for suggestions—and they got some crackers, including Highland dancing. And so the Highland Fling was well flung—it made a return later, showing this company’s ability to work within and stretch their own format.
They are never less than serious, but always on the lookout for a smile as they tease each other in set pieces, like when they made fool of one of them to look like a monkey.
The balance work is very impressive, even in the one difficult section where there is an attempt to jump on shoulders, balance and turn—more often than not it failed—but this is used to great effect by showing their relationships of power and support. It is a fascinating message to physically see embodied, especially given what we see in some of the streets in our cities, and we have an Olympics all around our conscious media presence too.
The climax brings all of their elements together in something less spectacular perhaps but just as poignant, as it concluded with my own thoughts meandering around costume and individuality. At the beginning, I had been looking to see why there was not some of unanimity in their costume, perhaps awaiting an alley-oop at the end of each tumble. By the end, that individuality had brought out my appreciation and destroyed any thinking that this was something to be put in a box. They would only crawl out and, like the packing cases, use it for another handstand or tumble.
We are all Olympic level critics when we see things like this, able to spot errors and make judgments because somebody did not quite land as we think they ought, but Ten Thousand Hours knows that, plays with it and by engaging you makes sure that by the end the only thought in your head is how long the standing ovation should last for.