With 15 years of international touring Gecko has become one of the most respected and lauded physical theatre companies thanks to it fascinating productions such as Taylor's Dummies, The Race or The Arab and The Jew, all of which have toured the whole world.
This is once again the case with Missing, which since opening in 2012, has toured in Russia, Georgia, Malta, Columbia, Mexico and throughout the UK. In 2015 when the show was on at the Battersea Arts Centre in London, the whole set was destroyed in a fire and had to be totally rebuilt in just 8 days, which they managed to do thanks to their many fans and therefore were able to go on with their international tour.
Aclaimed in the press (The Guardian and the Times) Missing is a creation about memory and identity, about how our past makes us the people we are. The shadows of Lily’s past invite her, along with each audience member, to consider how far they have strayed from who they are and where they come from.
Born in Israel but bought up in London, the artistic director Amit Lahav was trained by greats such as Lindsay Kemp and David Glass. Before establishing Gecko he worked on theatre projects with street kids in Southeast Asia. Throughout his carreer he has developed his own physical language which is based on emotion, musicality, breathing and physical work.
The visual power of his creations is another area which is often highlighted by critics. "Theatre takes enormous time and patience. Often, in the early performances, people describe a Gecko piece as being spectacular or technically dazzling. because they are always of an early performance and they almost always admire the spectacular. I’m not interested in the spectacular. I know how to make the spectacular and it’s not hard. The difficulty is to make something meaningful, and which contains many meanings."says this meticulous creator whose last piece The Wedding has once again seduced the British Press.