Creators of street events, played on visual impact and the evocative power of imagery, the acrobat-dancers of the Australian group Strange Fruit have been presenting their moving installations since 1994. The company director, Roderick Poole, comes from the collective Primary Source, another Australian group active from ‘89 to ‘92. Comprising about thirty artists including performers, sculptors, designers, painters, and writers, Primary Source specialized in outdoor events. One of their notable performances was "The Wheel," centered around a four-meter diameter steel wheel dragged through cities by twelve people in elegant business attire. One performer was tied to the wheel so that they continuously flipped over among the crowd as the wheel moved.
After Primary Source disbanded in ‘92, Poole aimed to continue in that line of artistic exploration with a smaller group of collaborators, creating events that could circulate more agilely. Thus, in ‘93, Strange Fruit was born, with their inaugural performance "The Field" debuting the following year commissioned by the Melbourne Festival. Set to music ranging from Giacomo Puccini's Tosca to Bach's Concerto for Violin in E Major and Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, "The Field," originally conceived as an installation, evolved over the years into a performance centered on the interplay of form and movement.
Clad in attire that evokes a surrealist atmosphere reminiscent of Magritte's paintings, the four pairs of performers—women in striking long dresses with bell-shaped skirts and men in flowing black suits with fluttering jackets and hats—dance atop four-meter high flexible steel poles. They embrace, disengage, harmoniously sway in the air, creating continuous patterns in space. It’s a surreal performance where the audience can observe "from within," walking among the poles.
"Flight," the group's second show, was created in ‘98. If in "The Field" the eight performers seem to dance in an extravagant imaginary court located between sky and earth, in "Flight" they openly draw inspiration from the myth of Daedalus and Icarus. The performance explores the dual desire to defy gravity and achieve flight, focusing technically on the contrast between falling and rising upward, between danger and aspiration for freedom, consciousness of heaviness and tension towards lightness. This time, the poles are utilized to their maximum inclination possibility, allowing the audience to view the spectacle from the outside.
