Created by Gravity & Other Myths. Directed by Darcy Grant. A Gravity & Other Myths production, presented by the Cultch. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Tuesday, October 30. Continues until November 4

"People can fly!" I wrote that in my notebook partway through Backbone, an extraordinary show from Australia’s aptly named Gravity & Other Myths.

If you saw A Simple Space at the York Theatre a couple of years back, you likely haven’t forgotten the company’s dazzling combination of playfulness and virtuosity. Made for a bigger space and a more expansive stage, Backbone sets the bar even higher.

What these 10 acrobats can do with their bodies will make you gasp over and over again. (Actually, they might make you gasp even when they’re just standing still: these folks have muscles where I didn’t even know muscles existed.) They balance 12-foot poles on their heads for an impossibly long time! They make a tower that’s three people tall, then put a fourth on top! Female acrobats walk along the heads of a shifting line of men! One woman floats supine in the air, balanced on a single pole! Another is held aloft only by her chin! They make a human pyramid while all of them are wearing metal pails on their heads! These exclamation marks are all justified!

But these physical feats never feel like empty showing off, because there’s such a joyous camaraderie in the group. Things that begin as games—like trading costumes or dumping sand over each other’s heads—quickly morph into breathtaking routines. In one sequence, the group stands in a long line behind a rope held at waist level. They randomly take turns numbering off, but when two people call out a number at the same time, they have to stand back while the rest of the group stretch the rope forward with their bodies, then simultaneously do handstands over it, causing it to snap back and whip the unfortunate pair upstage. Throughout the show, performers swing and toss each other’s bodies around like toys—but they also catch them with jaw-dropping precision.

Aesthetically, this show is a step up from the bare-stage intimacy of A Simple Space. The props are relatively simple—poles, rocks, buckets of sand—but they’re used inventively, and the sheer number of them makes for many elegant stage pictures. Geoff Cobham’s dramatic lighting design sculpts the space with its angled beams of single colours. Musician-composers Shenton Gregory, Elliot Zoerner, and Christopher Neale create a sinuous and percussive score, performed live on drums, keyboards, and violin.

But the human body—and the things you never imagined it capable of—are the big stars. Backbone’s run is short. Book your tickets now.