“Wow I feel weak!” announced the man seated in front of me at the conclusion of Sacre, a 65-minute acrobatic dance performed by Circa, an Australian contemporary circus company. By “weak” he didn’t mean he was moved by the performance, per say, but physically weak.

“What do you mean? I can totally carry three people on my shoulders!” his friend quipped, referring to one of several strength-defying stunts we’d just witnessed on stage.

I’ve been to the circus. I’ve been to contemporary dance performances. But I’ve never seen anything quite like Circa, who performed Sacre at the Boch Center Shubert Theatre in Boston on February 9. It featured ten barefoot dancers dressed in black under stark white spotlights and strobe lights.

The dance began with discordant electronic music that gave me uneasy horror movie vibes. The dancers climbed and jumped onto and off of each other in ways that were suggestive and strong, sexy and strange. Every once in a while someone would appear to die on stage and lie there unmoving.

The lights intentionally shadowed the Circa dancers’ faces, so it was difficult to track who was who. Six male dancers wore black suit jackets, sheer shirts, or no shirts alongside four female dancers wearing long black maiden-like dresses. Though the costumes were gendered, the dancing wasn’t as much, which I appreciated given the heavy eroticism (i.e., gimme gay shit gimme gimme). 

It’s hard not to read meaning into movements that involve lots of touching, falling, and catching. “Ah yes, they’re courting! Now they’re breaking up? Or, no wait, now there’s a third person? And now she’s dead? Hm!”

During one part, two dancers appear to wake up side-by-side, as if in bed, and then climb over and around each other as if having sex, if sex involved crab walking and being swung around by the wrists like a human Skip-It (maybe I’m just doing it wrong). 

Then, without much transition, the music shifted to Stravinky’s “The Rite of Spring.” With this change, the dancing became less rigid, more bendy and organic. This included some of the most wild stunts, like the aforementioned one where three dancers balanced upon the shoulders of one and branched their limbs like a human-tree.

In one of my favorite parts, all ten dancers form a sort of writhing earthly mass and push up a singular dancer, like a blooming flower, who then falls and is (thankfully!) caught by the others. 

The performance, which had no intermission, concluded with all the lights cutting out and a guttural male groan that prompted the audience to chuckle a little. I’m not sure the purpose of the noise, except that it seemed suddenly absurd that in all their exertion—lifting and catching and balancing—the dancers had been totally silent. There had only been the slapping of bare feet and other body parts on stage.

This realization prompted another question for me—how on earth are these dancers not bruised all over at the end of each show?