“We do a lot of running around, juggling, acrobatics, stunt work” says Wright. He and his fellow Trash Testers (Jack Coleman and Jamie Bretman) graduated from the National Institute of Circus Arts in the same year and their show is actually a result of a five minute clowning piece they developed while they were still students. “In our ensemble show in our final year we played council worker villains,” says Wright. As you do. “We were trying to figure out our ‘thing’, what we needed, and our clowning instructor gave us three wheelie bins. He left us for a couple of hours and we played around, using them in imaginative ways and in that first session of play the rest of the students stopped to watch us stacking them, climbing in, doing whatever we could do with them.”
Something obviously clicked into place at that moment because after the three graduated there was a gap of six months before they worked together again, yet when they did get together their five minute routine with wheelie bins developed seamlessly into a 45 minute show for their official debut at the Adelaide Fringe. “A beautiful thing,” says Wright. “We had that natural flow; we pulled the whole show together in two weeks.” Is their show for the Lorne Festival much different from what they have been doing at Adelaide Fringe and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival? “There are a couple of little changes but nothing much,” says Wright. “We sat down after the comedy festival and went through the whole show, we took notes, and looked at where we needed extra pauses, breaks, looked at what we needed to work on. It’s evolved from there.”
That sort of professionalism is clearly paying off as the trio recently carried off the Circus Showdown prize at Gasworks Theatre. Wheelie bins aside, do they have a particular shtick or trick that is a ‘signature’ in their work? “The basis of what we do is play,” Wright observes. “The show is full of tricks. Jack is probably the most acrobatic of the three of us. We have a nice section where a garbage bag explodes and there are hats everywhere and we play with them to a Frank Sinatra song. We do chair stacking and a ladder escape sequence which is a free standing ladder that we perform acrobatics on.”
Trash Test Dummies have developed a particular brand of slapstick that appeals to adults and kids, Wright reckons. They don’t swear so their show is safe yet hilarious and they reference elements of popular culture with a soundscape that includes snippets from icons like The Great Escape, Star Wars, Batman and Superman. Once they’ve done with leaping in and out of and dancing with wheelie bins they use them as drums in a very high-energy sequence. There is also a ‘babushka bin’ sequence where different sized bins are stacked into each other. “The show works both ways round,” Wright notes. “I did sort of a test with demographics. With our Melbourne International Comedy Festival shows, we had two shows at two different times. I listened hard to who was laughing when and the adults were laughing just as hard as the kids but at different times. After the show the parents had even bigger smiles than the kids. There are lots of jokes, adult humour but it’s never smutty or dirty. There are lots of popular culture references so people can take the kids to our show and get just as much out of it themselves. We make sure people will never look at a wheelie bin the same way again.”
Wright reckons he wants to work overseas as well as in Australia. Circus has already taken him to China for six months to work on a television show called Hoopla Doopla. “I’ve just come back from Fitzroy Crossing teaching local indigenous communities circus,” says Wright. Things certainly look bright for the trio – each of them has opportunities beckoning beyond Trash Test Dummies. “The funny thing is we’ve got anything locked down but there are expressions of interest. At the moment the world is our oyster,” Wright continues. “We have had different offers, from cruise ships, theatres…we are applying to do a tour of Western Australia.” Which acts from the world of circus excite or inspire him? “Going to see Circus Oz,” he answers. “The way they use their skills is a little bit different, the way they use their apparatus, the characters they create; it’s not traditional circus.”
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
