Defying gravity, an acrobat hovers at least five metres above the ground, legs poised, dancing between silken cords. The delight on her face is matched by the sheer audacity of every movement – both smooth and dangerously chaotic – as she pivots through the air.
The group lifts one of their team into the air, hands loosely holding onto the sides her face as if she’s a lightweight statue they’re shifting gently into a box. In that moment, she becomes more than a human, more than a body.
Two muscle men play physical jokes on each other, holding out their arms like shelves, offering to catch each other after sideways pirouettes through the air. Only occasionally dropping each other, with sideways knowing nods at the audience.
Humans 2.0 is lyrical acrobatic tumbling interspersed with visual poetics that inhabit the space between dance and moving sculpture. More than tumbling, throwing and strength, this show reaches far beyond what we might think of as ‘circus’ and enters the realm of sculpture.Â
Slow, practised movements create angles and kinks out of bodies, which become rigid like a warped children’s playground. Other team members clamber and scramble up these climbing frame bodies until they’re leaping high into the air, waiting for a net of arms or hands or even a back to appear.
Created by circus visionary Yaron Lifschitz together with the Circa ensemble, Humans 2.0 puts bodies to the test and suggests we’re all capable of much more than we know. Every member of the troupe defies something in this electrifying show – whether it’s gravity, shape, length, or even their own tendons. It was thrilling to see the strong men, who are usually the ‘base layer’ of human pyramids, fling themselves through the air like they weigh nothing more than a suitcase being flung onto a conveyor belt.
One of the most extraordinary moments was when a slight woman – not one of the normal muscled ‘base layers’ – bent backwards and took the weight of not one but two people on her lower stomach (or was it three?). She held them there as they leapt from a human climbing frame down onto her pelvic bone, her own frame barely moving as she absorbed their weight and the blows from their landings.
The musical score is perfectly matched with the mechanistic, post-human vibe. Throughout the show, the dancers look alternately like marionettes with their strings cut, like robots learning how to be human or like insects skittering across the stage and each other. The score clicks and taps and thuds and clacks like sticks on metal or insect shells crunching underfoot.Â
The final movement – both in musical score and in human form – wraps the show up in a gentle, moving, beautiful embrace. No more mechanised sounds or contorted bodies like zombies emerging from the soil; this time we have swaying bodies and energetic tumbling and music that uplifts the soul – and the body.Â
Read: Theatre review: Happy Days, Wharf 1 Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company
Humans 2.0 is more than dance, more than circus, more than acrobatics and more than all three. It’s a call to arms (and legs and feet and backs) to get up and move, to be brave and bold, to find our own way of crawling and leaping and skittering across the earth.
Humans 2.0 by Circa
Created by Yaron Lifschitz and the Circa Ensemble
Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne
Director: Yaron Lifschitz
Original Music: Ori Lichtik
Lighting Designer: Paul Jackson
Costume Designer: Libby McDonnell
Technical Director: Jason Organ
Tickets: $20 – $60
Humans 2.0 will be performed until 23 May 2025.
