High Performance Packing Tape | Adelaide Festival 2021 review

Household materials turn into the main players as a solo character goes doggedly about their pointless business.

Skye Gellman in High Performance Packing Tape. Picture: Tony Lewis

High Performance Packing Tape

Physical Theatre

FESTIVAL

Main Theatre, AC Arts

March 4 to 14

The tradition of determined, mad, cartoon characters that go doggedly about their pointless business is celebrated in this weirdly fascinating show.

Performer Skye Gellman (substituting for injured show creator Lee Wilson) has seemingly no interest in his audience as he manhandles large cardboard boxes, building a three-metre high pile before playing his part in its downfall.

At times like these, the ambient sounds are captured and through amplification turn from mundane to the dramatic.

Adelaide Festival. Skye Gellman in High Performance Packing Tape. Picture: Tony Lewis

It is in this transition from household materials that the packing tape, plastic chairs, cardboard boxes, balloons and outsized rubber bands turn into the main players.

High Performance Packing Tape is literally created from rolls and rolls of the wide, sticky household essential. As we watch, Gellman plugs on with measured deliberation, unwinding metres upon metres of the stuff between two stands to create a slack wire – or is that a slack tape?

In any case, it is dangerously high, and he can cross it most of the time, or fall off onto those cardboard boxes.

Microphones have been placed in strategic places to capture that ugly, farting sound of tape unwinding, or creaking under extreme duress.

Adelaide Festival. Skye Gellman in High Performance Packing Tape. Picture: Tony Lewis

In each scene the performer puts his trust in these mundane materials, which might explain why this show, originally planned for the 2020 Adelaide Festival, had to be cancelled after another accident in rehearsal. Fortunately, this time, an understudy was in place.

Kids, don’t trust these materials!

The highlights are self-constructed cocoons in, you guessed it, packing tape, and to complete the idea, Gellman is now naked, dangling, along with his spare parts, chrysalis like, each act increasing in spectacle until the finale.