The Pulse: Jaw-dropping acrobatics, exquisite singing, ferocious skill

The Pulse

Festival Theatre, Kingfisher

★★★★★

There is an extended sequence in The Pulse when the choir conductor and soloist Buia Reixach is spot-lit near the middle of the stage and sings, without words but with, by turns, vigour, encouragement and lament, to a series of solo acrobat-dancers as they move and fall; the rest of the choir as chorus, the rest of the acrobats as witness. It’s a mesmerising section in an outstanding show.

It’s a measure, too, of how integral Ekrem Eli Phoenix’s music and the Catalan choir Cor de Noies de l’Orfeó Català are to what is ostensibly an acrobatic show. The renowned Australian company Gravity & Other Myths return to Galway International Arts Festival with an acrobatic-dance-song production that is on a much larger scale than previous shows, featuring about 30 acrobats, women and men, and 30 singers, all women.

[ The Pulse: ‘Circus meets opera’ show set to demolish fourth wall at Galway festival ]

The stage looks as wide as a football pitch. The performers are togged out individually; movers in greys and whites, voicers in black. They move around the stage, both acrobats and singers, variously creating a crowd melee, or like a shoal of fish, in synchronised formation. They meld as one, and they separate. The relationship between the individual and the collective is key here: there is extreme interdependence, and trust and co-operation are essential, while retaining the singular, the personal. It’s a message for humanity, but also essential for performing such a demanding and skilful show.

The first of the series of dances or sequences is based on one-two-three-four-five, sung, but also building to, striving towards, a five-up tower of acrobats, with a sudden fall from the top at the end. All for one, one for all, all the while the choir almost goads by song.

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The acrobatics are jaw-dropping; indeed, at one point an acrobat seems to be held purely by her jaws. There are many sudden falls from a height into a net of arms. Backward rolls, lifts, spinning, circling. Bodies are thrown and flung – over and up, on to towers of people, a stretching of the limits of what a human body can do. They are humans of elastic, bouncing rubber. There is patterning of body and song, timed precisely. There’s also humour.

And it is visually beautiful, using light, colour, body patterns and criss-crossing ropes that thread through the audience and on to the stage. Director Darcy Grant’s show comprises much more than exceptional circus skills (though there are those, too); it offers an exultation of sorts, in the human form and its strength and delicacy, in the nature of relationships, in feeling fear and trusting in others.

The expansive 70-minute stage production is on a scale not seen indoors in Galway before, and to house it the festival created and kitted out a new, temporary black-box-style performance space within the Kingfisher sports centre at University of Galway, with a wide stage, 12.5m high, and raked seating for 1,200.

The voices are exquisite, the skills ferocious, the whole a thing of beauty. The audience on opening night respond with exultation and delight.

Continues at Festival Theatre, Kingfisher, University of Galway, as part of Galway International Arts Festival, until Saturday, July 22nd