My Bicycle Loves You

My Bicycle Loves You
Story Devised by Beatrix Christian, Patrick Nolan, Anna Raglan and company. Legs on the Wall. Sydney Festival 2011. Sydney Theatre. Jan 11 – 15, 2011. Perth International Arts Festival - Regal Theatre - Feb 22 - 26, 2011.

My Bicycle Loves You gets its name silent movie slapstick bicycle antics, among the many vaudeville sequences featured in film entertainments exhibited by an early Australasian travelling picture show family, incorporated in and inspirational to this production.

The beautiful hand-tinted films toured here and overseas between 1900 and 1914 by the Corrick Family troupe, and preserved by the National Film and Sound Archive, integrate with a vaudevillian physical performance from Legs on the Wall, then shifts the film medium forward to the present in the form of live interactive video. All this is accompanied by a live five-piece band, reminiscent of silent film accompaniment, including the delights of original instruments, but with the larrikin spirit of a Circus Oz band. Their featured interlude is a treat.

There’s a story … of sorts - a day in the life of seven quirky people living in an apartment building. The story is a somewhat uneven and flimsy, but the company members mostly bring their characters to life with wonderful individual physical theatre and acrobatic skills. In the end it’s really a lively, appealing vaudeville and physical theatre homage to a collection of films, a bygone entertainment, which must have once surprised and delighted country town audiences in the earliest days of cinema. A century out of their context, this creative interactive approach provides the new life, which makes them much more than a quaint archive.

Inventive, fantastical, whimsical, off-beat, laugh-out-loud funny, acrobatic and illusionist, My Bicycle Loves You is a unique, engaging entertainment.

Neil Litchfield

Link to Details of Perth season.

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