Contemporary dance is a weird thing to be part of. I’m so used to queuing for intellectually interesting, entertainment-wary shows, with small audience numbers often composed of other people from the industry. I’m used to these small audiences – but the step from a heaving thoroughfare to these quiet spaces echoes particularly loudly (if unfairly) in the competitive festival environment that is August in Edinburgh: who else goes to see these shows? How do they find out about them? Do they enjoy them?
Legacies
One show that I hoped would build up to a bigger audience by the end of its run was Dances Like a Bomb from Irish company Junk Ensemble, featuring veteran performers Mikel Murfi and Finola Cronin (previously of Tanztheater Wuppertal). Performed in ZOO Southside’s oddly big venue within the fringe context, it’s a quiet, rambling, unstructured piece of dance theatre that poetically ruminates on ageing, regret, death; on those the moments that define us, and those that slip away.
We open on the two performers, sitting still in their white underwear. In the background, the simple set manifests as an eruption of green, which if you squint looks perhaps like a head emerging from the earth. This beautiful set is not explicitly reference at any point in the piece, instead it sits in the background, weighty but not overbearing.
Dramatically, the work can sometimes feel like it needs tightening but that’s almost not the point. Instead, the audience sit in this dark place, willing their talented performers on. Cronin brings a delicacy and a wink in her eye, gesturing to her illustrious dance career. Murfi is a bent over, almost grumbling presence that inches across the stage, his dry voice cracking across the space. What do you want to forget, they ask each other? What haven’t you done? When were you at your best? Meandering through different physical and spoken word set-ups, including a brilliant slapstick scene that imagines different ways of dying, the performers physically tug, caress, and hit each other – sometimes out of obligation, frustration, or affection. It’s a wonderful, loose-knit performance of words and bodies, the art forms complementing rather than opposing each other.
Another show I catch in ZOO Southside, likewise meditating on legacy, is HARVEST from the Danish recoil performance group, choreographed by director Tina Tarpgaard. Two compelling performers and a square patch of earth with a strip of grass cutting down its middle, constitute the piece’s geography. Hilde I. Sandvold is a contemporary mover with a travelling, spacious, falling style; Jossette Reilly is a neo-flamenco dancer, rhythmic, direct and articulate in the extremities.
HARVEST starts with an interesting question: ‘would my body look different if I was a farmer?’ The question brings forth others. How much of who we physically are is innate or built up from choices we’ve made? If my buried body is unearthed, the performers continue, will people know I was a dancer? These questions hang in the air, rather than being directly answered. The interspersing of dance action, digs in the earth and increasing thuds from the podiums on which the audience sit, communicates an uncertain insistence. Uncertainty about art and effect, art and legacy, on the enormity of our changing earth and our ability to respond. HARVEST allows the mind to wander, sometimes out of the world it creates, but at other times into a reflective state.
Duets
From Denmark to Finland: I catch A Couple of Humans by Tsuumi Dance Theatre at Summerhall as part of the From Start to Finnish showcase. Two humans are waiting as we enter (performers Riikka and Antti Puumalainen). Looking out at the audience, they slowly put on very grey tights.
With a snap, we move from the casual to the crisp, through the very cool, subtle lighting design from Tiiti Hynninen. What follows is a series of very well-crafted choreographic sketches. There’s a patience to the pacing and commitment to the movement intentions, such that the audience can clearly see what they are meant to see: here, the dancers move together; there, they manipulate each other. Relationships and connections are brought to the fore in this clearly demarcated performance zone of abstraction, with fun music that has a constant quirkiness.
Alongside the distortion created by the tights, there is also extremely clever camera and projection work from Hynninen which sees the dancers move around an opaque screen and through different close-ups and angles. Fingers spreading in the tights makes for strange-webbed appendages. Bold red is shrugged on – a human desire for extravagance beyond the natural. There’s something othering too, in the focus on the skin or guise of human flesh and costume. It’s a gently surreal, kind and probing show, without pushing anything too far. We close on the comforting image of the two dancers curled in together, a couple asleep. And then it’s back out to join the other humans – I spy a group of human critics in the corner, typing on laptops.
