Is it fair to review a koha show by a charitable trust that does community workshops? Well yes, if they are competing for your time and attention in the crowded Fringe programme.

And when they call themselves Women’s Circus Aotearoa, someone has to say that if you are expecting something similar to Fuse Circus’s The Navigators or Awkward Productions &  Downstage’s Adagio or the work of the Wellington Circus Trust, this group gets nowhere near such activities let alone their standards.

Their only claim to the ‘circus’ tag is their beginner-level clowning. Apart from that there are no circus-level physical skills. Even the odd attempt to hint at such acts in an incompetent clown kind of way falls flat, and not in a wacky pratfall way.

The idea is that the group has been on some kind of intergalactic mission, in part to clean up the spaces between the heavenly bodies that populate outer space (women’s work). First they use balls and balloons and inflatable rings to demonstrate how space came into being, then they set out to re-enact their latest mission.

They all wear white-face with variations in eyebrow and lip design, hair style and costume all helping to define their individual characters. Some speak or make noises, others are mute. The boss lady, ‘Bella La Grocerie’, reading her over-written introductions, linking pieces and commentaries from a clipboard (which denotes under-rehearsal), keeps on insisting that what we’ve just seen is exactly how it really happened, which is a mildly amusing running gag.

There are rudimentary elements of personal clown characteristics but the routines they play out are poorly conceived as mechanisms for bringing these to the fore. Too often the sole rationale seems to be to try to be funny, which anyone who has studied the craft according to Le Coq principles will know is doomed to failure.

What makes us laugh – and is missing from this performance – is the intense distillation of human aspirations, fears, desires, frailties, naivety, gullibility and vulnerability in personalised clown behaviour which commands our empathy at profound emotional levels. It is the recognition of ourselves, each other and the world we live in that delivers the goods: truth is comedy. Bad group dancing and mucking around with eccentric objects is not funny.

The least we may expect from something with ‘circus’ in its brand is a display of extraordinary skills and then, unless it is busking or boulevard acts, some narrative context that elevates it all from mere showing off. 2009 Space Oddity tries for the context but brings little in the way of skills, extraordinary or otherwise, to the stage.

One woman, performing as ‘Consuela de la Frontera’, is known to be a very adept exponent and teacher of flamenco but just flinging herself about and pretending to be bad at it to no apparent purpose is bewildering to say the least.

Another, ‘Fish’, is good at twirling illuminated poi and tries to be clever at flipping a plate but this is way short of ready for an audience. The bit where she space walks and becomes detached from her lifeline and has to be saved should be the climactic moment, when all the characteristics that have been established in each clown come to the fore, in response to this extreme situation. Instead there is no credible, let alone larger-than-life’, sense of panic, fear, despair or heroism and nothing like an illusion of weightlessness.

‘Gerty Potts’ does a rant that seems derivative of Jane Horrocks’ character in Ab Fab but isn’t that funny; ‘Susan Powder’s mute poker-faced melancholy prods our interest but we get nothing in return; ‘Bella La Grocerie’ engages us in practicing non-verbal communication in preparation for the inevitable arrival of aliens …

They’re all very lovely in a supportive community way … but their show is way short of its potential.

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