‘I’m going to see a ballet juggling show,’ said I.

‘I’m sorry, you’re doing what now?’ said every single person I told.

‘It’s called 4×4 Ephemeral Architectures, which the website describes as a “fleeting journey through time and space in a unique dialogue between jugglers and ballet dancers.”’

I will not relay what the response generally was to that explanation.

I was a little dubious before the lights went down, both about the show and about the review that would come at the end of it. I don’t have the vocabulary to talk about dance, so anyone here for an informed response regarding the quality of the ballet is going to be sorely disappointed. My main ballet observation is that I am pleased to confirm that male ballet dancers have very impressive thighs. And is there a vocabulary to describe juggling? They didn’t drop any balls. Apart from in one bit, where they were possibly meant to, I’m not really sure.

Anyway, back to the start – it was about as weird as I expected it to be. People were juggling. People were ballet dancing. They were making funny noises, and creating the sound of a beat with their bodies. I began to quite enjoy the body percussion, then I felt a bit mystified by whether I was supposed to be taking some sort of point from what was going on in front of me. The noises turned into something of a chant, and one of the voices called, “You want a story? How much of a story do you want?” They were playing with me! It’s like they could hear me thinking ‘I don’t get this’, and decided to tease me for needing some sort of narrative cohesion.

There were some really lovely moments. In one scene, the jugglers were working with clubs, rolling them in circles on the floor. They became waves, and the ballet dancers leant on the jugglers backs, as if they were floating. In another scene, the jugglers were working with hoops, and the ballet dancers flowed among them effortlessly, somehow never bringing the whole display crashing down.

Which made something fall into place for me : maybe the jugglers are meant to represent us. Just normal people, trying to keep all our balls in the air. And sometime we come across distractions, like ballet dancers, trying to make the juggling more difficult. They demand that more and more balls are kept in the air (this was the bit where some balls were dropped). They cling on to you, while you carry on with your hoops, or your clubs. But rather than fighting these distractions, you can make something beautiful, if kind of strange, out of them. You can join in the dance, and make some sort of order out of the chaos.

Maybe ballet, and juggling, and living, do share something. Each requires precision. Each has a pattern, and if everyone understands the pattern then you don’t end up crashing into one another. You can make something quite special, and still throw in some surprisingly amusing ballet juggling gags along the way.

The show ends with a meta discussion about how to end the show. With a big spectacle? With a reminder of the patterns that had been thread throughout? Or with a discussion about how to end the show. And how do you end a ballet juggling show review? By wondering if it did actually have quite a profound message? By wondering if this is another trick, playing on my need for a story? Or do you just stop?   ★★★★☆     Deborah Sims      2/09/15