High Performance Packing Tape

High Performance Packing Tape starts with a massive bang. A lone performer lying prone on the floor strenuously expends all his breath to inflate a large balloon until the inevitable happens. It’s uncomfortable to watch, and immediately places the audience outside its comfort zone, as do many of the sequences that follow.

By using everyday items to create a performance, Branch Nebula have set out to challenge the audience’s notion of what theatre, dance and performance is, and can be.

The program tells us that High Performance Packing Tape is ‘designed to thrill’ as it takes the audience ‘through a process… not an easy process’. Unfortunately, the process is not terribly interesting and we are reminded why some elements of performance are best set up in advance, and indeed, others should never leave the rehearsal room.

The audience bears witness to the moving and stacking of boxes, the inflation of yoga balls and the liberation of chairs held together by rubber bands, all of which seems unnecessary and of little interest. The creation of a tightrope by stringing roll after roll of packing tape between two poles brings a whole new level of tedium, and a repetitive and somewhat annoying soundscape with it.

High Performance Packing Tape seems to have let process end up getting in the way of any storyline or character development. Skye Gellmann, a talented circus and physical theatre performer (alumni of SA’s own Cirkidz), gains little empathetic traction with the audience as he goes from one ‘process’ to another, with only smatterings of ‘risky’ and ‘thrilling’ aerial and tightrope performance in between.

Moments for the audience to find something likeable, witty, or even sad, about the performer, the performance, or the props, seemed lacking. This felt like a lost opportunity to create a richer experience for the audience. Perhaps the closest we got to feeling something for him was when he was swinging back and forth, on a packing tape rope, butt naked (why?) with a box cutter in his hand … and then it was mostly fear for his genitalia and his body hair!

The sound design was interesting and well executed, although at times too loud for comfort. Lighting was also well executed, mostly subtle and unobtrusive, until an over-lengthy, minute plus, bombardment of strobe was employed.

Unfortunately, the opening balloon explosion is the only bang the audience gets from High Performance Packing Tape. From then on it suffers from too much set up and not enough stunt. High Performance Packing Tape limps along and concludes with a naked whimper.

If Branch Nebula have set out to challenge our notion of what performance is, it would appear that all they have done with High Performance Packing Tape is reinforce that audiences are more comfortable with a finished product than a process.

Jenny Fewster

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