Ian Abbott at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe – Part 1

Ian Abbott at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Part 1  

Snipping at the fringes of the Fringe this year have been some discussions about price, privilege and the voices that are not present. On one side are those who directly benefit from Edinburgh Fringe espousing the historical foundation and ideology on which it was built; they treat it like a cult, swearing unswerving devotion to it and proudly wearing their badge of service reflecting the years they have put into their community. On the other side are those who see the reality of the Fringe as a paid marketplace, a neoliberal capitalist playground that has long since lost the values on which it was founded. One of the works on From Start To Finnish, the showcase of work from Finland at the Old Lab (Summerhall), speaks to some of these macro discussions. It is Reetta Honkakoski’s The Desk that ‘mines her personal lived experience of a cult in this meticulous ensemble piece about the seductive power of discipline, hierarchy and mind control.’ 

With five ‘students’ and one whistle-happy ‘leader’ we see 60 minutes of tightly choreographed, softly punctuated and highly repetitive wheely-desk manipulation with students jostling for prime position right under the nose of their glorious leader. The duration of the scenes is always almost too long, but Honkakoski pulls it back before we lose interest and in some ways it has a predictability these structures like the army, enforced education, and cults often manifest: the erasure of the self, physical automation and the absence of constructive thinking. They just do. However, the final 10 minutes deliver two scenes that lift The Desk to another level. There is a well-worn trope of the puppet/master/invisible strings that has been done to death; however in this context it works conceptually. The detail, weight and anatomical cause and effect of the pulling activated parts of the body in each of the five dancers is delivered with such finesse and believability this section alone is a fringe highlight. It is followed by an absolute skewering of a lot of the former (and current) communist statues that are built in victorious poses, questing forward into battle or displaying benevolence to the poor; echoing the pulling down of statues by the people, we see the leader in rigor mortis slowly decaying, ready to timber, be caught and repositioned by the students. The Desk is like an absurd, fascist epilogue to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with an immaculate execution.

111 by Joel Brown and Eve Mutso — part of the Made in Scotland showcase at Emerald Theatre (Greenside at Nicolson Square) — is named after the number of vertebrae Brown (Candoco Dance Company) and Mutso (former Principal at Scottish Ballet) share ‘as his spine has fused, meaning he has only 11, and she moves like she has a 100.’ As our genial host Brown welcomes us, he offers some context about how the two met in 2015 on a project initiated by Karen Andersen of Indepen-dance and choreographed by Marc Brew (who gets a name check for his witticism of “getting his strap on” as he secures himself in his wheelchair). 

Brown and Mutso have developed an unsettling intimacy; during their floor sections and on the exoskeleton cube of ballet scaffold barres (which creates a miniature Krypton Factor), we see them meet, mirror, linger, brush, carry and display their physical prowess on stage but are left after 55 minutes without a defined relationship. There’s a lack of coherence to the work or of a sole choreographic voice with something to say; this may have something to do with the number of ‘outside eyes’ in the creation of the work — Tim Nunn, David Street, Risto Oja and Susan Hay. The work feels less like a piece of theatre than a display of what Brown and Mutso can do (they are both excellent dancers) alone and together on a stage, but this isn’t enough. Having worked with the aerial coach Mark Gibson, the 20 or so minutes they are engaged in hanging, climbing, and conquering heights with the cube, there seems to be the potential for an interesting outdoor work, where technical virtuosity and feats of strength are familiar and welcome. 111 feels like it wants to get out. 

Back for its sixth year, the Taiwan Season features the return of Chang Dance Theatre with the first iteration of their new work Bout at the Old Lab (Summerhall) and an Edinburgh debut, Monster, by Dua Shin Te Production at Dance Base. 

Bout claims to be ‘inspired by observations of live boxing shows on TV, investigating how spatial configuration and role setting evolve nuanced conversations between moving bodies.’ This sounds way more academic than is necessary; the reality is it’s much closer to a sometimes playful, sometimes sombre physical portrait of the brothers Chang and how their relation, friendship and conflictships manifest in distances between them over the years. There are some inventive moments of how their bodies come together and echo each other; an opening scene sees one body pacing the edge of the stage and is eventually joined in step and in time (with little more than a bead of sweat between them) by a second and a third and we’re now watching a multi/single being with six arms and six legs with perfect gait and rhythm. Another scene is where one brother is the other’s 3D shadow; as one strolls across the stage inhabiting verticality, the other is at home in his horizontality glide-sliding and mirroring him detail by detail. However, choreographer Chien-Hao Chang burns through scenes and ideas at a rate of knots meaning that not every scene is successful and the ones that are are quickly discarded and not extended to their dénouement. At 40 minutes Bout hasn’t quite settled into its final shape and would benefit from some judicious editing; it needs to not leave the audience feeling like we’re fighting to like them as we know they have buckets of charm after the success of Bon 4 Bon.

Monster is an Entirely. Different. Kettle. Of. Fish. Choreographed, and performed by Yen-Cheng Liu (who also created the sound design), the programme note states, ‘Everyone alone carries a different monster in his/her own mind, a monster gradually bred, grown and shaped by various influences in life. If the master of one’s mind is the soul that dwells in the body, it must be a complicated compound, expandable, shrinkable and distortable at different stages of life. A distinct monster.’ 

Reminiscent of Antony Gormley’s 2007 work Blind Light at the Hayward Gallery (aka Fog in a Box), the audience enters a white-out. We see no monster. We have a 3-metre visibility range as the studio is suffocated with dry ice; as our eyes begin to settle on the scenographic detail — somewhat like The Generation Game — we’re presented with a white, stationary masked figure holding an elongated and home-made version of a boom mic. Along with Liu, a number of noiseless technicians move a rotary telephone, a spherical object wrapped in white paper, a small white wireless, a white 3m x 0.5m LED scrolling screen, two white prison-like loudhailer speakers on extendable stands and a pair of floodlights into a line from stage left to stage right. Enter dry ice smoke blast part 2. As the LED screen delivers philosophical platitudes on time, self and chasing unknown futures, some of the things are moved, delicious silhouettes are created, Liu gets nude and crawls off stage in an act of self-loathing. Slowly the things are moved, re-presented, dismantled and taken down. 

It is the perfect fringe companion to Ultimate Dancer’s For Now We Through The Mirror, Darkly as it offers us a mirror to what we are and what preconceptions we bring to the studio. In effect, Liu has created an alternative, 35-minute performance art version of Frankenstein that places us with him in this simple/complex/indulgent/terrifying/laughable space.

Ian Abbott at Edinburgh Fringe: The Self Revealed

Hannah Nicklin, Equations For A Moving Body, Summerhall, August 9; Rosana Cade, Walking:Holding, Forest Fringe, August 17, and Skye Reynolds, Pitch, Dance Base, August 17.

Skye Reynolds in Pitch (photo: Lucas Kao)

“A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.” – Madeline L’Engle

The self is firmly on show at Edinburgh Fringe Festival (as it is every year). There’s a constant examination and excavation of the self; performers offering a sliver of their lives to the audience in exchange for attention and time. How much can we see and are we allowed to see? When does dance, performance and live art really reveal itself (or the self’)?

Pitch is Skye Reynolds’ 30-minute solo, made in collaboration with Jo Fong, which she describes as ‘…a realisation: how are we living our lives? The act of selling oneself, selling an idea.’ This is a constant in the life of the independent, self-produced choreographer; selling themselves to venues, festivals and programmers to try and make what they’re offering appeal to the dance taste makers of the UK. Although there’s little choreographed dancing, there’s oodles of giddy movement interspersed with text which Reynolds delivers with aplomb; through her ebullience and constant refraction of her self and her history we see how a self can become centred — she offers us constant crumbs of personal milestones: playing the good wife and the whore; dreaming about David Bowie, playing the virgin in Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring, truth bending about working with Kylie Minogue and the time she was in China pretending to be an animal in a perspex box. She leaves us no time to dwell on how these moments impacted her (or how they affect our impression of her) as she skittishly flits from one revelation to the next. She’s selling herself, her story and her experience to us. Are we buying? I think we are.

In the second half, Reynolds begins to pull out from her big black box pre-scripted texts about things that perhaps she and we could care a little more for: Brexit, Belgium, Syria, Calais and dozens more, macro issues that feel an infinity away from the first half. Beginning with a micro focus on the self and then scaling up and shifting onto the world stage is an intelligent way to anchor and shift our thoughts to global issues we are collectively facing that should warrant greater attention. Mid-way through the work Reynolds blends life and art even further as we hear an overly long home recording of her daughter Tallulah playing piano and practising her Misty Copeland; it’s a fine rendition but the impact is made within the first verse and chorus and we don’t need to hear the rest. After a short recitation of REM’s Losing My Religion Reynolds abruptly leaves the stage along with the spotlight that has been chasing her around for the entire show. Just as we think it’s an ending Tallulah herself emerges to sing an original song whilst pinning up a hand-written note that invites the audience to donate to Plan UK, an education scheme for girls in Africa (after three performances nearly £100 has been donated). The impact would have been heightened if Reynolds had stayed and watched her daughter sing so we could see that familial connection; it would have amplified all the different selves that she and we present to the world.

Scattered amongst Pitch there are echoes of the way Wendy Houstoun (Reynold’s has been a performer in Houstoun’s Stupid Women) presents her work, from the witty and rambling (though actually carefully constructed) word association to the visible control of the soundtrack through an mp3 player and making social commentary on the dance world, too. Pitch and Reynolds happily flirt on the artifice-to-reality spectrum with an intelligent construction, humourous delivery and buckets of vitality. We are introduced to what Reynolds was, is and could be; it offers an intriguing possibility of how Pitch could sit with a companion piece (authored by Reynolds or somebody else) that might allow us to dwell on, get under her skin of and make us feel a little more uncomfortable with ourselves.

“So you might say, ‘Why do you end up making theatre in a world in which there is already too much of that? Creating layer upon layer of artifice?’ Perhaps the function is to pierce through that cloud and show reality — so the function of art is to make things — to show: ‘Hang on, this is real.‘” – Simon McBurney

In the act of opening up on stage, does the level of virtuosic performance equate to the scale of trauma and of personal revelation from an artist? Does the fact that the more we hear about the tapestry of their life mean we should connect and empathise more?

Hannah Nicklin’s Equations for a Moving Body is an elegy to endurance and she describes it as ‘A story about the physiology of endurance — when our brains tell our bodies to stop — and the psychology of continuing.’ The psychology of extreme athletes is a rich research field; there are always people fitter and faster than you. However there is a set of traits which such athletes often share: curiosity, persistence, lack of fear and sense of boldness. This is a performance about prowess, mastery and the pursuit of betterment, yet it’s delivered with a precision and a sparse physical palette in which the emotional effect is arresting.

For over 80 minutes Nicklin guides the audience through her attempt to complete the Outlaw Triathlon (a 2.4m swim, 112m bike ride and 26.2m run) in July 2015 in her 30th year. The current narrative around Team GB’s success in Rio is that the public is seeing the rewards for the investment, sports science and the marginal gains that can be delivered through detailed preparation. It’s in this preparation and detail that Equations for a Moving Body shines brightest.

With a laptop, projector screen, some index cards on the floor and a water bottle, Nicklin talks to us from her chair or directly front on. Through her adept mix of live internetting and her nuanced vocal and physical delivery, we see flashes of her through the way she curates her online self in her profiles on Facebook, Flickr, and Bandcamp. As she scrolls, surfs and finds the URL’s to accompany her story we see her visual bibliography; there’s something satisfying in her sharing this intimacy. As she delivers stories of how she endured, trained and delivered we listen to Nicklin’s body as she slowly rock’s gently on her heels, the minute finger twitches and rubs on the palm; there’s all sorts of almost imperceptible physical signals at play here and although she clearly acknowledges us and is present in the room, I can’t help but sense she’s performing it for someone else, someone who’s not here.

How a work settles in a body changes the delivery and intonation; I saw this performance in the first week of the fringe (when some works are still trying to find their natural rhythm) but Nicklin had a comfort with these stories and with the science behind them. She understood the rhythm of her story and how to tell it; how to build, when to rest and let us recover. The stories and training are her embodied experience and there was an ease with which it flowed out. Nicklin met with a number of scientists in the construction of the work and there’s a strand of research from Dr Sarah Partington on the idea of the Storied Self which Nicklin paraphrases on her Ironman blog. ‘She explained that we are creatures of narrative — that as self-aware animals we build our sense of self through storytelling — we communicate our sense of self through stories. We need our story of self to be ratified socially, and we build our identity out of the stories we tell of our past within our social contexts.’

Equations for a Moving Body is an intimate portrayal of the self, layered with emotion, tragedy and curiosity, from which Nicklin constructs a compelling narrative and delivers with a vocal charge that ensures her storied self is one that is worth listening to.

 “. . .sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that?”
“Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.” – Carlos Ruis Zafon

“Everything you see after you open your eyes is part of the performance.” That was the final instruction as I walked in silence from the Out of the Blue Drill Hall to the beginning of Walking:Holding, a work by Rosana Cade that turns Leith into a theatre. But the question is who are the performers? Hidden in the simple act of holding the hand of a stranger whilst walking together in public offers a number of self-examinations and surprises that I had not anticipated.

It was a blue, unclouded afternoon as I held the right hand of the first stranger; I denoted a tension in her arm as we paraded down Leith Walk. After a short exchange of questions and answers (we were free to be silent or to talk), she stopped and turned us to face the glass of a shop window: “What do you think people would say if they looked at us?” This one question knocks at the heart of Walking:Holding. Assumptions are often made based on how we dress, the age we look and our presumptive sex. I am guided over a zebra crossing and we are stopped by a man who asks, “Do you have a light?” “No,” I reply. “Well can I hold your hand instead?” At that moment, like a baton relay, I am handed over to my second companion and I discover an alternative physicality: he is taller than I am and so I need to raise my left arm higher to find his natural gait and we constantly adjust in an attempt to find a mutually comfortable proximity. As two people we are in an equally unstable position — we don’t know each other’s backgrounds, fears or curiosities — yet there is so much stimulation; I’m alive to new people, places and exchanges. The public are entirely unaware they are witnessing an intimate duet that has only just begun. Were we real in those 5 or 6 minutes together with each walker:holder? Were we performing a version of ourselves? What did we reveal to each other? I found out that one of the walker:holder’s identified as asexual and had never held a man’s hand in public in the daytime before.

There is a large amount of research in the field of walking psychology. Studies have shown that walking improves cognitive performance, aids problem-solving and creative thinking as well as enhancing our working memory. I remember so much of my emotional response in this 40-minute experience; more so than in many theatre-based performances: the sound of the loose change in the right yellow trouser pocket of walker:holder number six and the olfactory lingerings as I ambled past a number of oily garages with walker:holder number five. Your body is alert to everything: who’s thumb is on top; is it palms together or fingers entwined? Holding the hand of a child is loaded with safety and protection and it’s within that frame that I think Walking:Holding exists: we protect each other in public through this remarkable part of our body with which we can communicate so much. Without Cade being present she has constructed a frame and set in motion a number of carefully considered complexities that ensure this would resonate differently in parts of the world where human touch is either welcomed or frowned upon. For me, I left a little bit of myself with each of the six walker:holders and shared an equality of intimacy that has only been rivalled by Verity Standen’s Hug. Walking:Holding is a hugely intelligent work that left all sorts of residues on me: intellectually, physically and emotionally.

I came away from all three works thinking about the spectrum of artifice-to-reality and how other people can act as our mirrors. Skye had Jo Fong assembling, collaborating and refining herself as she went along; Hannah did the same through the people she encountered to build her story and the science behind it and Rosanna through her choice of walker:holders. All of them encouraged a self-reflection and if you combine the four titles (moving, holding, pitch(ing) and walking) they offer an instruction on how to approach the self and the people in your life; sometimes you dial up one or the other depending on the situation or who you’re with, but as a guide for the self you can’t go far wrong.

Ian Abbott at Edinburgh Fringe: hip hop culture

Smother by 201 Dance Company, Skal by Lin Dylin and Bang! To The Heart by NUE Dance Company, Edinburgh Fringe, August 8 & 9

Smother by 201 Dance Company (photo: Cody Choi)

“Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual than an element in a mass.” – Milan Kundera

How do you translate a culture? West Side Story was a concept musical based on Romeo and Juliet that Jerome Robbins proposed to Leonard Bernstein in January 1949. It took another six years before playwright Arthur Laurents came up with the idea of two teenage gangs as the warring factions, one of them Puerto Rican, the other self-styled Americans. In November of the same year Stephen Sondheim joined the project as a lyricist and in August 1957 the stage version of West Side Story premiered in Washington D.C., with the film version released in October 1961. Successful translations take time to gestate, brew, fade and re-shape.

Feuding rivalries and gang culture are older than Shakespeare and it is within the embrace of West Side Story via the 90’s Sega Megadrive video game Streets of Rage that NUE Dance Company’s Bang! To The Heart resides. Heralding from Italy and presenting in the main space at Zoo, Bang! To The Heart offers the audience a large-scale, 60-minute work with 10 dancers, a complex set, multiple projections and an original soundtrack. The narrative premise is an exact replica of West Side Story – we have the Angels (Sharks) vs Zombies (Jets) fighting for supremacy; a gang member falls for a girl, loses the respect of his allies and has to make a decision whether to follow his heart or go back to his brothers. However, it is here that the similarities end as Bang! To The Heart is a graffiti cartoon fuelled with parkour bounding, a late night riot of outrageous bboy skills and facial exaggeration. With a number of distracting side panel screens projecting fluorescent animations of bodies glitching through an urban cityscape, the main focus lands on two large, reversible, wheeled walls that offer retractable ledges, staircases and scaffolding that allow the dancers to climb, bounce and launch themselves with consistent frequency. Rattling from scene to scene, face-off to face-off, the bboying is some of the best I’ve seen; extreme flexibility and strength sees crazy hollow backs, air flares and a whole suitcase of other power moves that wouldn’t be out of place at the bboy championships. It is physically impressive and the stamina is unrelenting; even in the last ten minutes with glistening brows none of the moves lose their edge. However, it isn’t all macho posturing. There are three female dancers who’s role is little more than moving wallpaper and street dance sirens calling to the bboys with their bodies; they are lifted and thrown around with brute force; without safe practice, damage to their bodies looks likely. Just because the bboys are at ease pushing the limits of their own physicality they should not jeopardise the safety of others within the company. With so much technical skill in the cast and heavy investment in production values, the company would benefit from a dramaturgical hand, otherwise Bang! To The Heart will fill its 22:20 kitsch slot and remain a slavish West Side Story imitation with lashings of bboy talent.

“If you’re not messing up every now and then at practice, you’re not doing anything above your ability to progress.” – Crazy Legs

How do you adapt a culture? Baz Luhrmann, the director of Great Gatsby, Moulin Rouge, Australia and Romeo and Juliet has just released The Get Down for Netflix, a glossy technicolour and romanticised fable on the birth of hip hop in the summer of 1977 in the Bronx. 12 episodes made for $120 million. The first six episodes are woven around a pair of young lovers who through music try to better themselves and move away from the culture and people that forged their personalities and life experience to date. With all four elements of hip hop — mc’ing, b-boying, graffiti, dj’ing — and plenty of Puma on show, Luhrmann integrates shots of original news footage in an attempt to transport us back to the Bronx, but at it’s heart, it’s a pond skimmer: dancing on top, unwilling to break the surface and burrow beneath a rich, politicised and complex culture.

Skal is a twenty-five minute work exploring macho culture within hip hop by the Swedish duo of Pontus Linder and Olov Ylinenpää (aka Lin Dylin). Dance Base presented Skal as part of Nord Dance, its festival of Scandinavian work, in November 2015 which is where I first saw it. After a second viewing I notice the visibility of child-like play and a depth of nostalgia that permeates the work. Linder and Ylinenpää start upstage seated on a picnic rug decorated with plants, records, soft furnishings and a slide projector. They oscillate between this quiet reflective space (which leaves the audience with little spectacle but the mundane re-arrangement of records or the watering of a plant) and the stage — the place where they play. Choreographically they’re reconfiguring windmills, belly swipes and air flares, slowing them down so we’re able to dissect them: we see battle tricks in duet and solo form broken down to reveal when momentum gathers and where delicate weight shifts take place. In a form that rewards either dizzying speed or precision freezes, Skal attempts to adapt the original into an alternative choreographic language; imagine bboys in treacle.

As two performers who are still active on the battle scene, Linder and Ylinenpää represent different sides of the bboy coin; Linder holds his footwork in high esteem, stylishly tinkering at the edges of the melodies whilst Ylinenpää is all power moves and physical prowess. There’s a comfort and unspoken solitude between them on stage and this settles in between the gaps of performance. When they return to the rug and strike up the slide projector we see a series of kaleidoscopic amorphous shapes oozing and lolling around. Silence and space are a rare presence in the hip hop world and consequently these 25 minutes feel unusual, which I appreciate; Skal is a quiet study of the bboy and Lin Dylin happily inverts the tropes that are usually associated with it to create a balanced and playful simplicity.

“Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure — attractively packaged but inferior in content.” – Alan W Watts

In the UK there are a number of artists who frame themselves as making dance/theatre that uses hip hop as their primary movement language whilst mixing other styles and influences; Vicki Igbokwe, Botis Seva, Tony Adigun, Emma Jayne Park, Benji Reid and Robby Graham — a by no means an exhaustive list — are artists who are sensitive to the origins of hip hop, offer ambitious narratives for their audiences to engage with and have been pursuing theatrical presentations of their work for the last decade or more.

How do you dilute a culture? Smother by 201 Dance Company returns to the Fringe after a successful run last year that saw the company hoovering up a number of 4-star and 5-star reviews from EdFest Magazine, Broadway Baby and Scotsgay. Housed on the main stage at Zoo, the company of seven dancers explores the story of two men’s broken encounter whilst touching on the themes of addiction, obsession and commitment. 201 presents homosexual relationships in hip hop as sensitive territory but if you consider the history of hip hop and the funk styles of waacking, voguing and the balls that emerged in the late 70s and continue today there has been consistent and active communities within hip hop that are not defined by their sexuality. These communities kept themselves underground because of the intolerance of others to accept different types of bodies and beliefs; inside and outside hip hop the prejudices they encountered are still alive today, and I’m unsure whether attitudes are thawing or not.

Artistic director, choreographer and dancer Andrea Walker is to be applauded for attempting to explore this area as few in the UK have done so to date. However, for over 55 minutes we are presented with a number of low-quality commercial street dance routines — truncated to match the length of a pre-existing musical tracks — interspersed with faux, angsty dacting (dance acting). The routines are loose, unsymmetrical and there is an inconsistency across the dancers in terms of who is and is not able to hit the beat or understand the musical texture and nuance required. The dacting sections bear no relationship to the routines (which repeat motifs and material multiple times) and the physical encounters offer a uni-dimensional representation of relationships that are angry, promiscuous and unsubtle. Walker is noticeably the weakest dancer; he gives himself a lead role, often front and centre of the arrow formation, yet his execution has little attack and is always a beat behind. Smother lacks emotional subtlety, historical awareness and presents a series of shallow sub-standard choreographies that could be found in an improvers street dance class at Pineapple. You have to know where hip hop has been to know where it can go.

“Hip-hop artists, especially the older ones, are the ones who knew hip-hop was a worldwide phenomenon before the mainstream caught on, so hip-hop artists are forward thinkers. We want to stay with the new.” – Nas

Ian Abbott at Edinburgh Fringe: The Hiccup Project

The Hiccup Project, May-We-Go-Round?, Dance Base, Edinburgh Fringe, August 9

Chess Dillon-Reams and Cristina MacKerron in May-We-Go-Round? (photo: Maria Falconer)

“If you never tell anyone the truth about yourself, eventually you start to forget. The love, the heartbreak, the joy, the despair, the things I did that were good, the things I did that were shameful – if I kept them all inside, my memories of them would start to disappear. And then I would disappear.” – Cassandra Clare

The lost art of bedroom choreography is flung out of the wardrobe and up to the Edinburgh Fringe with gusto. May-We-Go-Round? cycles through a 60 minute excavation of past loves and exorcises them in the style of Taylor Swift. We meet Ian, Elliott (with a double t), Luke, the fit PE teacher, and oodles more as Chess Dillon-Reams and Cristina MacKerron narrate each other’s temporary heartbreak via shared direct address, full sass choreography and bedroom dance routines.

The face is where we as humans connect with each other; we don’t look at the suppleness of the spine or a hyper-extended leg to feel closer to a performer; we can admire it but it inevitably distances us. Chess’s and Cristina’s faces are things of elastic wonder; eyebrows on the go slow, tightly mouthed squeals of delight or throwing us two barrels of side eye — they perform with their whole bodies and we drink them in entirely. There’s a real guts and guns approach to the quality of movement — a throw-your-body-on-the-line-and-leave-nothing-behind — and this spirit engenders a forgiveness for any lack of technically sound unison, unfinished moves or broken lines.

May-We-Go-Round? acts as a connector to our own histories, a show with two performers we can relate to and it triggers memories of Dreamphone, Now 42 and Smash Hits. The Hiccup Project have cleverly tapped into a 90s nostalgia kick and it disarms the normally reserved contemporary dance audience. Their audio bibliography is clear (Spice Girls, Craig David and Cher) and how they describe and execute their work (not a mention of the word dance in the description) resonates with the majority of the under-35, female audience who were having a noticeably good time. Chess and Cristina are full of empathy and it’s impossible not to like them.

“The strong bond of friendship is not always a balanced equation; friendship is not always about giving and taking in equal shares. Instead, friendship is grounded in a feeling that you know exactly who will be there for you when you need something, no matter what or when.” – Simon Sinek

Their relationship and familiarity with each other is clear and strong; the work is embedded in their bodies allowing their performance to shine through in the detail. Working with Antonia Grove and Lou Cope on the dramaturgy has resulted in a tightly-woven and well-constructed work. In the sections between the narration and movement they break the fourth wall and gift the audience a generous quadruple vodka and a dash of cranberry or explain the reasoning behind Chess’s excessively red face. These sections aren’t gimmicky but fit the tone, mood and enhance the connection between performers and audience.

There’s a growing crop of independent female choreographic voices that are excavating their own past and using comedy intelligently to bring audiences towards them: Sarah Blanc, Justine Reeve, Skye Reynolds, and Rhiannon Faith. The Hiccup Project’s choreographic candyfloss can be added to that list. I look forward to Now That’s What I Call The Hiccup Project 2.

“Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Under its influence, ordinary songs take on dimensions and powers, like emotional superheroes.” Kate Christensen

Ian Abbott at Edinburgh Fringe: Jack Webb’s THE END

Jack Webb, THE END, Dance Base, Edinburgh Fringe, August 10

From Jack Webb’s THE END (photo: See Imagine Define / Sid Scott)

“As if febrile waves were trembling there, pools of madness… something devouring that could lick a man all over like a flame, annihilate him, with a pleasure never known before.” – Anaïs Nin

We are greeted by three cradling, fevered ghosts (Martyn Garside, Rachael O’Neill and Keren Smail), individual nodes who re-animate to find and fold themselves into the arms of another. Their approach and contact triggers a rejection of touch as one of the dancers melts out of the frozen embrace to find another moment of solitude. This passing of energy and breath continues long after the house lights dim and I begin to see the residue of bodies that are no longer there. Through repetition there is generosity. It is here after eight or nine minutes that I begin to notice new details: how the gait of the body shifts, where a gaze rests, and this repetition begins to sharpen my focus.

In THE END movements and moods are built, cradled, and re-presented enabling you to see them from different angles. A circular footwork pattern that oscillates between walking backwards in a circle and moving it forwards with a change of rhythm is a simple gesture, but placed on repeat through a low level of haze that softens the bodies and casts pools of light and shadows across the stage, it becomes bewitching. Each tight metronomic step and shift in weight pulls me deeper into an alternative choreographic landscape. With residues of the sinuous form of Krump, where movement and emotion are released by alternative parts of the body, Webb frames dozens of striking images, like Smail chewing on Garside’s elbow, their limbs isolated and out of sync, bodies needing to be set and re-set and reverberating to a different beat.

There’s a scenographic deftness that erases any division between the choreography, soundtrack and lighting — the composite parts are chiming to define a mood, intensity and focus that aligns. Four floor-mounted, magenta strip lights and a soundtrack featuring Swallows and Mediate by Rrose offers experimental drone techno that sets ears to fervour and makes knees wobble with its bass.

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” – Samuel Beckett

With a clear philosophical framework and intention behind the work, Webb offers some guiding words in the programme: “THE END is an invitation to look at ourselves, our world and to consider what we leave behind”. In the 55-minute performance Webb invites audiences to linger, spend time and burrow amidst his choreography. The intensity from being contained in a 60-seat studio theatre in close proximity to a frenzy of movement and back-lit, silhouetted faces of ecstasy is a perfect antidote to the 3000+ performances at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Webb carves his choreography from a different stone and it is entirely refreshing. He resists clean line and lyrical arcs and emphasises jittery glitches and the degradation of a movement. Seeing Garside in raptures, totally embodied and living inside the moment is incredible to watch; his total being is immersed in physical and emotional fireworks.

We begin to see the end of THE END about 10 minutes out as the rejection of touch at the beginning is inverted: running, wrist clasps and spinning increases: an urgency takes over, building a rhythm incrementally to a point where the dancers lungs give up, their bodies unable to rise again from the repeated falls. They are spent and exhausted, at an end. As they get up slowly and leave, the audience is alone with the stage and its echoes. THE END will not suit all who encounter it but if dance, choreography and audience tastes are to alter and diversify then we need to embrace difference and find more room for voices like Webb’s. THE END is a sensitive and generous performance and with Webb’s rare craft he enables audiences to see, sharpen their focus and stay with difference until the end.

“Not so bad this ending because one is getting used to endings: life like Morse, a series of dots and dashes, never forming a paragraph.” – Graham Greene