Macro: Opening Night Event | Adelaide Festival 2022 review

Macro was essentially a reworking of acrobatic ensemble Gravity & Other Myths’ hit show The Pulse with added bells and whistles.

Macro: Opening Night Event. Performers from Gravity & Other Myths. Picture: Andrew Beveridge, supplied

Macro: Opening Night Event

Physical Theatre – Australia & Scotland

Adelaide Festival
Village Green, Adelaide Oval

March 5

It may have been branded as Macro, but the Festival’s opening event was essentially a reworking of Adelaide acrobatic ensemble Gravity & Other Myths’ hit show from last year, The Pulse, with a few added bells and whistles.

Those whistles – and fiddles and Gaelic vocals – came in the form of a small ensemble of musicians from Scotland, where the event will also open the 2022 Edinburgh Festival.

Arnhem Land dancers Djuki Mala (the former Chooky Dancers) took over some of Pulse’s comic moments and added their own, along with graceful contemporary movement sequences, to create a unique sense of Indigenous Australian/Celtic fusion.

Adelaide Festival 2022. Macro: Opening Night Event. Performers from Gravity & Other Myths. Picture: Andrew Beveridge

Macro was slow to start, with a lengthy Kaurna smoking ceremony sequence which finally resulted in its young women cultural custodians being carried through the crowd to the stage, followed by the acrobats warming up in the aisles in similar fashion.

The Pulse worked brilliantly in a theatre, and its three or four person high towers of performers crisscrossing the stage while standing on one another’s shoulders remain spectacular, as is the way they collapse and are caught.

Gusty winds added an extra degree of difficulty and danger, but the performers held fast.

However, without a raked stage or raised audience seating, much of the intricacy of the escalating physical patterns – which involve the Aurora choir, taking the total to more than 100 people on stage – was lost.

Adelaide Festival 2022. Macro: Opening Night Event. Picture: Andrew Beveridge

Much of the show also takes place in semi-darkness, with the choir and musicians dressed in black, at floor level on a cavernous, three-storey black stage.

Video screens on either side of the stage were not large, and for the back two-thirds of the audience, the Macro action must have appeared micro.