The Games We Play review — Gandini Juggling show could do with more balls and fewer concepts

Friday night’s packed house at The Place in London for Gandini Juggling was a deliciously mixed bag of ages and types, testament to Sean Gandini’s broad appeal and loyal — not to say cult — following. His latest show, The Games We Play, is a two-person deconstruction of the tricky art of juggling in which Gandini and company co-founder Kati Ylä-Hokkala punctuate their dexterous manipulation of balls and rings with explanations, reminiscences and anecdotes about juggling past and present.

With his self-deprecating manner and smooth delivery, Gandini — raised in Havana, mother Irish, father Italian — is an engaging speaker, but 60 minutes is a long time and the lack of structure made it seem longer still. If your inner child craves the spectacle of a 10-ring juggler in silver lamé then you would be better off with Cirque du Soleil, but Gandini is still getting mileage from the “borderline between the cerebral and the physical”, as he puts it.

The stage was sparsely furnished with two folding tables and a few dozen coloured balls (the whole lot would fit in a sidecar), but the minimalist mise-en-scène was jazzed up by Guy Hoare’s scene-setting lighting. The snatches of low-tech music and sound effects seldom interrupted the easy flow of patter.

While previous shows majored on the maths involved in juggling, this one shifts our attention to colour rhythms. This feeds a few gags — two colours are a Rothko, one colour an Yves Klein or a Malevich, dropped balls become a Jackson Pollock — but this idea soon ran out of steam and the pair switched to a tried and tested tabletop duet, lobbing, passing and sliding the bounce-less balls in a precision routine — a kind of Chaplinesque version of Find the Lady. The constant snatching at balls, the gentle tangle of the arms and hands were delivered with the tender, deadpan wit seen in Jonathan Burrows’s work with Matteo Fargion — indeed, Burrows’s mix of legerdemain, wordplay and light percussion might offer a fruitful collaboration.

Gandini has been working with dancemakers since co-founding the company with Ylä-Hokkala in 1992. Much of his best output has been created, oyster-like, in response to an external stimulus. Recent ventures with Ludovic Ondiviela and Alexander Whitley and last year’s Life (“a love letter to Merce Cunningham”) were proof of this. Ditto his terrific work on ENO’s Olivier-winning 2016 production of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten: a living backcloth of juggling hieroglyphs.

More dance would certainly be welcome in The Games We Play. There was a brief, free-form juggling tango — Gandini flicks a mean gancho and Ylä-Hokkala is a former champion rhythmic gymnast — but by the end of the hour he was reduced to writing his own critique, ticking off the company’s pet tropes: “Every show we do has a side-to-side vaudevillian duet sitting on chairs . . . A neo-romantic intertwined hands duet . . . Some gratuitous nudity.”

The ending felt flat and, as if conscious of this, Gandini floated some possible alternatives: “Kati doing 10 minutes of Finnish stand-up? Goats coming in from both sides? Nuns?” All very meta, but this reluctance to just shut up and juggle reads like a man temporarily weary of his gifts.

★★★☆☆

gandinijuggling.com