Backbone (Gravity And Other Myths, Melbourne Festival)

There's a popular theory out there that with a bit of dedication and 10,000 or so hours to spare you can become an expert at anything. Whether or not that's true, it takes much more than time to make being an expert look easy.

Michael Jeffrey Jordan didn't become synonymous with basketball because he got buckets. MJ is a household name nearly 20 years after lacing up his last Air Jordan because when he did his thing he the made world's next best look ridiculous (also Space Jam). It's a rare pleasure watching a person that can make the seemingly impossible look like a doddle, so it's a little shocking that acrobatic ensemble Gravity & Other Myths (GOM) has about 12 of them. The collective are perfectly named, and witnessing them in action will have you scooping your jaw off the floor so often that by about halftime you'll think, screw it, it can stay down there.

When the curtains rise they're all lying on the floor and it looks like they've raided the prop department from The 36th Chamber Of Shaolin - there are buckets laid out in rows, a line of a dozen large stones and poles ranging from arm's length to about five metres long arranged from smallest to largest. There's also a rack of clothes and a suit of armour. GOM stand up and begin to move about the stage in a flurry of activity; switching clothes, shifting the props around. Drummer Elliot Zoerner and violinist/keys player Shenton Gregory takes their instruments left of the stage and start playing a few wandering notes. Simple but ingenious, the Helpmann-nominated lighting design casts sharp lines across the stage. It's playful, kind of like walking in on a slowed down Benny Hill gag.

Before long they're running up each other nimbly as capuchins, stacked in towers standing four people tall. Some fly through the air using each other like swing sets and jump ropes, while others set records for longest handstands and most consecutive backflips. At one point ensemble member Mieke Lizotte is lifted five metres above the stage with a single pole in the small of her back like a victim of Vlad The Impaler.

But it's more than just physically impressive. Director Darcy Grant has said that GOM's goal was to create meaningful circus. That almost sounds like an oxymoron, but the results are undeniable. To start each action is approached with the mix of unaffected joy and strange ceremony of children at play, carefully pouring sand from the buckets over one another with concentrated solemnity before being dragged through it happily.

But as Backbone progresses GOM punish themselves. The ensemble push until they're noticeably exhausted; breath laboured, muscles quivering. There's a physical honesty in the performance that builds to an acute tension — they make the impossible look easy and then reveal the inherent fallacy in that. By acknowledging that even Herculean stamina has a limit and then actively vaulting it GOM give their feats an element of risk that feels genuinely dangerous. The ensemble set out to question different elements of strength, and as Backbone finishes with each member holding out their stones in a challenge and offering to the crowd we add strength to the list of things made more beautiful by impermanence.