Commissioned to celebrate the 40th birthday of seminal North London venue Jacksons Lane, Gandini Juggling’s new show meta is a glorious concoction of many of the ideas that the company have explored over the last 25 years – ultimately recalling their earliest experiments with the choreographer Gill Clarke.

Built around Abbott and Costello’s famous baseball coach sketch ‘Who’s on first?’, meta gives a nod towards juggling’s popular entertainment roots. More importantly, it also reflects juggling’s inherent structural heart. Just like the classic comic double acts, juggling is a back-and-forth affair. By unpicking and replaying the sketch in different configurations (doubling, trebling and multiplying the two interlocutors of the sketch) Gandini Juggling transform the simple ‘call and response’ nature of the gags into a landscape of perpetual confusion and uncertainty. This leads to many of the humorous moments for the work – whether it is dancers Kate Byrne, Erin O’Toole and Emma Lister’s execution of the text of the sketch alongside rapid tendus (suggesting a particularly gossipy and disorientated corps de ballet) or Owen Reynolds’ patronising rendition whilst juggling a sequence of varying three-ball patterns.

In spite of this witty and popular primary source material, in terms of its overall tone, meta owes more to Gandini Juggling’s recent experiments with darker themes in their work – for example the indoor version of Smashed (2011) or their darkly vicious CLØWNS & QUEENS (2013). The latter performance in particular is a clear touchpoint for meta’s inclusion of the performers’ violent assaults on furniture and each other.

In CLØWNS & QUEENS Gandini Juggling explored the inherently exploitative nature of circus’s use of sexuality and violence. In meta, this idea is developed further with the company beginning to look more explicitly to the world outside of circus, most notably in the moments when Lynn Scott provides a darkly moving explanation of the first, second and third base metaphor for sex. Alone in the spotlight she haltingly recounts the descriptions of these sexual acts and, as she does so, it becomes clear that the world of meta actually closely reflects our own; clear that Scott’s trauma and the violent outbursts manifest our own frustrations and turbulence in the face of life’s confusions.

Of course, little of this has so far touched on the juggling in meta. As is usual with the company the juggling is precise, crisp, adventurous, and involves not just the jugglers but the dancers as well. The juggling material is drawn from the company’s previous works, including many of their early signature motifs. Most notably there are ‘cranes’ (gently sweeping juggling patterns in which balls are dropped, rather than thrown, from outstretched arms into the juggler’s hand) and the deliberate inclusion of the calling of the rhythm and numbers (a succession of ones, twos, and threes) associated with particular throws. It isn’t necessary to know the source of this past material, because it is the tone in which the performers execute that patterns that help create the shifting emotional landscape of meta.

It is doubtless that meta’s aesthetic would not have appealed to Clarke’s more minimalist sensibilities, but Gandini Juggling’s rich use of deconstruction, fragmentation and extensive oblique quotation would not have been possible without her influence. In this way, meta proves that Clarke’s influence continues long after her untimely death and that Gandini Juggling continue to draw on this to define new possibilities for juggling.