Didn't catch Forms in Motion? You didn't miss much.
On Saturday April 5, Activities Commission Limelights hosted the group that advertises themselves as "circus entertainment with theatrical flair." Unfortunately, what the group failed to tell you in their self-advertisement is that Forms in Motion lacks any more talent than if you or I tried to put on a circus.
The act opened with an introduction from a giant, mechanized green parrot flapping its beak saying nothing at all intelligible. It may have been important to a story line, but alas, I couldn't understand a word. After the bird finished mumbling, a few of the performers came out and started flapping their beaks equally incoherently.
From what I could gather of the story, some woman couldn't keep track of her man so she grabbed a couple girlfriends to go carousing with a bunch of guys aboard a pirate ship to get the dish on where lover-man disappeared to. If that doesn't sound like the plot line to a high-budget porn flick, then I don't know what does.
Right in line with the aforementioned genre, Forms in Motion was horribly overacted. I tried to remind myself that children's performances are often overacted, because kids tend to like that sort of stuff, right? After all, it was Siblings Weekend, so the weekend's performances would naturally be geared toward the little folk. Jump ahead an hour and the audience witnessed the actors running around the stage playing wasted and pretend-puking more convincingly than most college students. In fact, I couldn't help but shake the thought that maybe these were Geneseo students instead of the professional performance organization they advertise themselves as. When the juggler came on, I was completely convinced that it was that same student who always juggles out on the College Green, but with juggling wands falling every which way, it looked as if he was having a very bad day.
And of course, what do drunken pirates do in their spare time? Well, acrobatics of course! The "acrobatics," however, were shaky attempts at middle-school gymnastics. Their human towers more resembled double-decker liabilities than impressive stuntwork. Laughs were generated from screw-ups, not from comedic entertainment.
If you ask anyone who happened to see the show if the trash I'm talking is the truth, chances are, only half of the people who bought tickets would know. Why? Quite literally, so many people took intermission not as an invitation to go to the bathroom, but rather as an opportunity to leave this painful performance entirely. If the performers spent half as much time practicing their routine as they did how to act when they screwed up, they may have had some semblance of a show. Unfortunately, Forms in Motion was no more than one big flop.