Tues -Sat 9.30 pm until April 2, 1995
Reviewer: Kate Herbert. Reviewed in March 1995.
Watching Crying in Public Places is like observing four women in their living room, playing, arguing, telling stories.
Watching Jump! has the wicked feeling of eavesdropping on four friends playing, arguing, telling stories. Occasionally they catch you at the keyhole.
Crying in Public Places (Anni Davy, Maud Davy, Karen Hadfield and Jane Bayly) have a cheeky, warm, natural style that makes me want to rush up and hug them all. Their melange of original a capella songs, body percussion, movement and yarn-spinning, has a fluid quality. The dynamic of Jump! is almost tidal. It seems to capture the wave motion of a life.
"Am I brave enough to jump?" they sing in their last song. Throughout the piece, they jump both literally and metaphorically. The fear of leaping from a cliff equates with that of hurling oneself into a new experience. Anni wants a dog, Jane is pregnant (really!), Maud celebrates being saved from marriage in the Mid-West.
The passion and guts and ease of this performance resides in the genuine bond between the women and the stories being more fact than fiction. Anni Davy's plaintiff cry as she lies curled on the floor, "Maudie, I can't feel my fingers", echoes her own fall during a circus trick three years ago.
Jump! resonates with the great leap forward which is our life, but it also teases us with tiny details, observations of our strange, self-absorbed and quirky world views. It's comedy is surprising and observational. "Where the fuck is my future?" quips Maud Davy as she peers under our seats.
Jumping is "the tragic imperative". Each little observation adds up to an indefinable and charming representation of the joy and pain of jumping.
KATE HERBERT
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