Founded in Sydney virtually 4 a long time in the past, bodily theatre firm Legs on the Wall is famend for his or her use of visible spectacle to confront arduous points and immediate deeper reflection. At this 12 months’s Sydney pageant, the corporate’s artists carried out on prime of a 2.5 tonne iceberg suspended 20 metres above Sydney Harbour in a commentary on local weather change. And in 2018 and 2019, they toured Man with the Iron Neck, a strong present that used aerial theatre to discover suicide amongst Indigenous Australians.
This week, in a headline present for Brisbane pageant, the corporate premieres a brand new co-production: Holding Achilles, a queer reclaiming of the Iliad that tells the love story of Achilles and Patroclus via a mixture of ultra-physical theatre, visible spectacle and puppetry on a grand scale.
Holding Achilles is a first-time collaboration between Legs on the Wall and Queensland’s Useless Puppet Society, the corporate behind the award-winning 2016 manufacturing The Wider Earth, which reimagined Charles Darwin’s voyage to Australia with intricate and extraordinary puppetry and toured to the UK, in addition to 2021’s Ishmael, a hi-tech, gender-flipped area age tackle Moby Dick.
Talking to the Guardian, Legs on the Wall creative director, Joshua Thomson, referred to as the collaboration with Useless Puppet Society’s founders David Morton and Nicholas Paine a “no-brainer”.
“We sit in very comparable visible areas, however our experience is sort of separate, and I feel that’s evident on this work – it surpasses something one firm might do,” he says.
The set, co-designed by Morton and Anna Cordingley (Van Gogh Alive, Jasper Jones) contains a 2.4 metre gold and silver disc – representing the solar and the moon – suspended over the round stage, upon which our bodies hurtle, battle and fly with Legs on the Wall’s signature acrobatic prowess.
The unique rating is co-written by composer Tony Buchen, Grizzly Bear drummer Chris Bear and musician Montaigne, who additionally performs dwell within the present. With funding from the Australia Council’s main festivals initiative, and monetary backing from London-based manufacturing firm Glass Half Full, it’s a possible wager Holding Achilles will tour nationally and internationally sooner or later.
Commanding the stage alongside the 2 warrior lovers – performed by Stephen Madsen and Karl Richmond – is the determine of Heracles, who morphs into an outsized bear operated by 5 rod puppeteers. Different puppetry feats embody an armada of 77 30cm-high ships, showing within the pivotal second when Achilles and Patroclus pledge their enduing love for each other as Hector and his Trojan forces put together to strike.
The concept for the present got here from Morton and Paine within the wake of Australia’s poisonous marriage equality debate; as companions in each life and enterprise, they needed to strip away the layers of heteronormativity which have been utilized to the story of Achilles and Patroclus over the centuries and eliminated the romantic components from the ambiguous relationship between the 2 nice legendary warriors of historical Greece.
Within the eighth century BCE, when Homer is believed to have created his epic Iliad and Odyssey masterpieces, a romantic relationship between Achilles and the person he liked “past all different comrades, liked as my very own life” – Patroclus – wouldn't have been controversial. However centuries of homophobic and heteronormative western interpretation has modified the love story, be it romantic or in any other case, into what is usually framed as an unambiguous manly friendship between comrades in arms, sure collectively via timeless loyalty.
Students have argued via the centuries concerning the nature of the connection between the 2, usually making use of modern-day ideas of sexuality to an historical world the place labels of homosexuality and bisexuality have been largely irrelevant. As US Greek literature and tradition tutorial Gregory Jusdanis places it: “To make Achilles and Patroclus homosexual isn't traditionally false in the best way it might be in the event that they got Fb accounts or have been discussing multiculturalism over cappuccino.”
When the 2017 Australian postal vote for marriage equality occurred, alongside damaging and discriminatory public debate, Useless Puppet Society have been on the cusp of premiering the corporate’s manufacturing of Laser Beak Man, a feelgood present with a utopian imaginative and prescient of a extra numerous and inclusive world.
“The factor that we simply stored asking ourselves is, why are we so silent on this time, when there’s such upheaval taking place in a group that we’re part of?” Morton says. “As storytellers, there was a accountability … to provide a voice on this.”
When the proper to marry no matter intercourse or gender was enshrined in Australian regulation that December, Morton believed the seismic change in public attitudes in direction of same-sex relationships opened up new fields of creative exploration – outdoors the strictures of particularly queer content material and into the mainstream.
“Useless Puppet Society has been very targeted on the reimagining of well-known tales from the western canon and remixing characters, placing a brand new spin on these characters within the tales that they inhabit, to talk to extra up to date points,” he says. “As occurs with all the good tales, they get reinvented via time by every technology that encounters them – which was one of many causes I used to be drawn to the story of Achilles.
“It appeared prefer it was too good to be true for us to not dive into this materials … to place a recent stamp on what a homosexual love story would possibly appear like.”
Holding Achilles runs at QPAC theatre in Brisbane till 10 September, as a part of Brisbane pageant.
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