I arrive into Edinburgh jetlagged and unsure on what dance shows are the ones to see this year. It’s my first year in some time that I’m not living in Edinburgh during the Festival, so my immersion in its dance offerings is more of a dip than a plunge.
review
Snips from the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe
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7 min
Scottish Dance Theatre in Moving Cloud, by Sofia Nappi. © Brian Hartley
Works by choreographers from Belgium, Scotland, Denmark, Spain and Italy in a quick dip at the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe
Julien Carlier and Mike Sprogis in Golem. © Stanislav Dobak
Dance Base continues its partnership with the larger fringe operator Assembly, and it’s here I catch most of my dance performances. I start with Golem from Belgian dancer and choreographer Julien Carlier / Abis Company and sculptor Mike Sprogis (an Aerowaves 2020 selection). The words ‘work’ and ‘craft’ spring to mind in the opening section of this carefully constructed performance. Both artists begin by independently working on their material; the sculptor with his clay, the performer with his body. The sharp relief of dancing next to the moulding of clay highlights the specific physical mechanics of dancing, honed over years of training, rather than dance’s capacity for expression. Sprogis fashions a face from the clay that gets compressed and stretched – Carlier likewise moves through the different potential folds of his form.
In the second half, the performers move in complement to each other, trusting and falling into each other’s embrace. Sprogis moulds and presses into Carlier’s flesh, lifting him up into a shape Sprogis desires, or that Carlier finds, before his body continues the momentum and moves into another shape. It’s interestingly hard to know if this is improvised, as the care between the two practitioners feels very true. As a performer, Sprogis has an awareness of being watched that is neither over-dramatic or shy, which intensifies the work’s liveness. Golem is a work that asks theoretical questions about what and why we create but answers them in practice, which is a pleasing riposte to much conceptual dance that remains in a textbook.
Seke Chimutengwende and Orrow Bell in Charlotte Mclean’s Futuristic Folktales. Photo © Amy Sinead
Having thoroughly enjoyed And from Scottish artist Charlotte Mclean in 2022, I return to her newest work, Futuristic Folktales. Mclean begins by standing on stage with her two performers – Orrow Bell and Seke Chimutengwende – to wonder: why is she asking them to perform a highland fling while the world is burning? Her answer – that dance and watching dance is inherently political, and that she is offering a dance of hope – is evident in the work’s themes; but Futuristic Folktales also continues this easy navigation between on and offstage.
Bell and Chimutengwende make a compelling performative duo; Bell speaks and moves with assured confidence in both, while Chimutengwende has a crystalline clear voice that rises through the audience when he sings. Futuristic Folktales considers wombs, birth, creation, and what we do once we come into existence. Out of all the things that have emerged from nothing – examples vocalised by the performers range from plants, racism, and vulvas – one of those things that has taken root is the highland fling, an almost improbable mix of cultural and national specificities that finishes with the dancers’ fingers sprouting up to the sky. Drenched in gorgeous lighting from Emma Jones, that either illuminates the sparse Dance Base studio or creates an intensely colourful wash, Bell and Chimutengwende physically question what all this birthing and being means. They wiggle themselves through womb-like gaps that they create with their limbs, or pause and chat to each other about what they’re struggling with, looking out toward the audience. Bagpipes swell in and out of Malin Lewis’ richly layered score. The work is strong, but it’s the palpitation of pointed curiosity about our world that emanates from the director’s decisions that really stands out.
My dip into the fringe starts to become frantic splashing as I try to squeeze in more shows. So, it is a welcome suggestion from my editor that guides me to another performance because it looks ‘fun’. I end up at Transhumanist from Next Zone as part of the #Danish showcase, choreographed by Lene Boel. It’s a crisp, enjoyable forty minutes with two dancers, Malthe Ørsted and Martin Karlshøj. Moving with impressive precision that feels like an extension of the electronic soundtrack specially composed by Rex Casswell, they play at ideas of being human and crossing over into the artificial. They physically converse, mime beating hearts, and at one point seem to play-fight and lasso each other. Their plain white costumes allow their bodies to be the focus under neon lighting. Transhumanist muses on its ideas but is not constrained by them, instead allowing the technical artistry of its performers to stand out.
Beyond Dance Base, the big stage of Zoo Southside and the national recognition of Scottish Dance Theatre (SDT) results in a long queue outside the company’s double-bill of The Flock and Moving Cloud. I see it on the relaxed performance date, and before the performance begins, artistic director Joan Clevillé explains they have an ‘inform, don’t adapt’ approach. And so, the stage momentarily darkens to show us the darkest moment that will happen in the performance, and then we are played the loudest noise that we will later hear. Happily informed, the house lights dim – though not fully so as to continue the relaxed environment – and the performance begins.
Scottish Dance Theatre in The Flock, by Roser López Espinosa. © Brian Hartley
The Flock by Roser López Espinosa was originally created for the National Dance Production of Catalonia in 2017, and then re-imagined for SDT in 2023. The piece is inspired by the ‘migrations of birds and the desire to fly’. It is composed of three parts, the first of which sees the dancers dotted across the stage, moving in an exact unison of arms swings, flaps, curves, and jumps – until they’re not, and an offbeat rhythm emerges in the group.
And then they fall, seeming to have lost some ancestral knowledge of how to fly. In this gentler but no less acrobatic section, dancers are draped over each other, lifted up, thrown in the air, dragged across floor, or rolled over into handstands. It’s an excellent example of the dancers’ finesse in how they execute these technically astute movements under the appearance of doing nothing. We finish on a satisfying third arc with a more intricate group conversation than before, with glances, ploys, and trusting gambles, as the dancers seem to say: ‘am I going, are you going?… Let’s go!’ The space gets eaten up, the dancers’ energy and the music’s intensity increases; it’s a beautifully executed visual performance.
The second piece, Moving Cloud, is an interesting experiment. It’s choreographed by Italian-born Sofia Nappi to traditional music composed by Donald Shaw and TRIP, a Glasgow-based band who ‘unite the kindred Celtic traditions of Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man’ and who perform live on some nights. The dancers enter dressed in period pieces; they’re here to show off and party. They strut, wiggle, play, and pose. They build to an energetic pitch, waving their arms and flinging their torsos. It’s the energy of a ceilidh, but with a cooler, contemporary aesthetic. Some in the audience attempt to find that ceilidh atmosphere of whoops, whistles and claps – and with a live ceilidh band, this might have succeeded more. I’m unsure if it quite hangs together, but there’s something compelling there.
As I leave my last performance of this fringe, I inspect my programme notes more closely and spy a note from Espinosa on a poignant ripple of influence: ‘Thanks to John Ashford [founder-director of Aerowaves and Springback] for lighting up the spark, and to all the dancers who have been part of this journey.’ ●
Edinburgh, Scotland
