Heaps of Fun
If the Jamaican Bobsleigh Team has taught us anything it’s that even the sun can’t stop the Winter Olympics. In Heap and Pebble two athletes are determined to prove this once more by bringing figure skating to a world left iceless by global warming.
Heap and Pebble’s creators Dancing Brick are interested in how an art like figure-skating might transcend its usual medium. Having trained at the Lecoq school, the struggle to communicate is central to their work as they avoid a dependence on text and instead specialise in physical theatre and in alternative ways of signifying ideas. I first encountered them with 21:13 which explored the predicament of two travellers stuck in a miscellaneous foreign country, waiting for a train. They’re forced to invent ways to break the ice in the absence of a shared language and the show left men stronger than myself in floods of tears over the tragically doomed love that emerges. Another piece, Hannah and Ike, follows two emotionally inarticulate 50s teenagers on a date where they remain separated throughout by a visible on-stage chasm. Only their names betray the hurricane of emotions they do not yet have the language to express.
Dancing Brick describe their work as “accessible, beautiful visual theatre”, and it is all those things, but it was the inventiveness of 21:13 that made it such a highlight of 2008. Having literally immobilised themselves with the ice-skates-indoors format, it will be interesting to see how these two overtly physical performers overcome and assimilate that restriction into their act.