Embodying the Impossible review – beguiling tricks of the magic trade

The Guardian

12-03-2025

Throwing shapes is expected at this dance space but throwing voices? That's one of the connections between two pieces presented by the network Aerowaves. In Iterations, performance artist and magician Tom Cassani finds himself interrogated mid-show by his makeshift, goggle-eyed hand puppet ('Where's it all going?'); while in W̶e̶l̶come, Compagnie Les Vagues' ventriloquist trio hold poker faces as they greet us, name by name. It's a clever, beguiling, lightly humorous and occasionally maddening double bill devoted to manipulation. Both acts vocalise our predicted responses and directly comment on – even dismantle – their performances.
Ambling on in a black boiler suit, Cassani has a coin trick to show us, again and again. It will be different each time, he says, 'believe me' – although disbelief rises with each minute. Who hasn't, after watching such a trick, been convinced they could catch out the magician if they could just watch again? No dice. Cassani toys with us, replaying his mystifying act with variations, even standing right among the audience.
Iterations has a similar approach to Show Pony, in which German company Still Hungry take the razzmatazz out of circus tricks and also convey the repetitive toil that goes into learning an act. Cassani asks what makes the routine different when he does it with flashy music and a grandiose air, or if he were to perform it on the street instead of a stage, or in the manner of a contemporary dancer (cue loosened hips and knees to the floor).
What if he tricked us while thinking about his grandfather? That iteration and a – tall? – tale about swallowing a coin are teasing suggestions of a more personal hour, but Cassani gives away little of himself as he explains the techniques of prestidigitation. After a leisurely start, the show takes hold in an intimate moment when he reveals the callus on his hand that results from, and now enables, a specific trick. A touch more autobiography would leaven these scholarly assessments of effect and method, and his inquiry into the balance of power between performer and audience.
Cassani certainly trains the eye for W̶e̶l̶come, an uncanny dance-theatre piece from France that majors in minuscule movement then climaxes with a thrumming tangle of itching and tickling. Choreographed and performed by Joachim Maudet with Sophie Lèbre and Pauline Bigot, it begins in freeze frame, their eyes wide. What unfolds is as much about how the trio sees us as how we see them; sometimes the perspective is ambiguous. 'They are all so elegant,' purrs one, peering into the audience, yet they're the ones in matching yellow polo necks. They dabble in mind-reading, anticipating our reactions like Cassani, in a piece that is intriguing yet similarly takes its own sweet time.
In the first half of W̶e̶l̶come, the bodies of these occasionally yodelling ventriloquists move almost as imperceptibly as their lips. The key movement here is in the tongue and diaphragm; the piece trains your attention on the internal rather than external and plays with that contrast on several levels. There's an air of mock wildlife documentary as the trio act out delight in a creature's cuteness and distaste in its bodily functions. But it's pleasingly daffy, too, even as it conjures muddled scenarios of hostility and the search for safety. Those lips are eventually liberated and the trio's tongues waggle to rampant percussion. They hazard a guess at befuddled critical reactions, concluding 'there were interesting things along the way' rather than a grand adventure. It sounds like a deathbed reflection.
Iterations tours Europe until 5 April. W̶e̶l̶come tours Europe until 17 May.