Original director and choreographer
Byron Perry. Tour director Karen Therese. PYT Fairfield and Force Majeure. Q Theatre, Queanbeyan. Friday May 17 at 10.30 am and 8 pm.
It felt like a wisp of a season for a short show. But Jump
First, Ask Later is anything but a wisp of a show. This piece celebrates western
Sydney, its mix of ethnicities and individual histories as well as the
physicalities of urban music and movement. And it does so with a reflective
intelligence as well as with the appealing nature of the tumbling and balancing
routines.
Films of Jackie Chan and the impossible urban physical
antics of many an action hero are clear influences as the six performers tumble
and soliloquise around the scaffolding set. The tumbling and routines are
powerful; the stories that the five young men and one young woman tell are
windows into lives that reveal something of migration and much of finding a
place in the world.
This might be a wisp of a review but it was hard not to come
away moved by the dignity and hope of the stories and the characters. It’s a
show that undoes much of the stereotyping that goes with where people live.
Thanks to Joe, Patrick, Ale, Jimmy James, Ivana and Tristan for dropping by
Queanbeyan with a reminder.
Alanna Maclean
