Ian Abbott at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe – Part 2

Ian Abbott at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe – Part 2

As part of the British Council Edinburgh Showcase at Emerald Theatre (Greenside at Nicolson Square), Chisato Minamimura’s Scored in Silence is a ‘solo digital artwork that unpacks the untold tales of deaf hibakusha — survivors of the A-Bombs that fell in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 — and their experiences at the time and thereafter’. Having visited the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum (NABM) last year, I spent some time thinking about how Japanese museums present information. In the city there are six numbers representing the total deaths from the initial impact of the “Fat Man” alongside the thermal blast winds that killed many more, for many decades after. NABM presented warped metal water towers, items of clothing, radiation shadows, melted rosary beads and much more from that day — August 9, 1945 — with a level of emotional neutrality that was massively affecting; there was no bombast, no histrionics, just a presentation of what happened. 

Framed by this history, Minamimura appears as a floating spectral presence behind the Holo-gauze screen, inhabiting the past and giving voice to the trauma and history of ‘people like her’ — those who have been silenced. Through her use of BSL (and British Pathé-like voiceover provided by Peter Abraham), Minamimura echoes this mode of presentation with an accomplished sign mime performance (supported by Tetzuya Izaki), aided by a suite of simple white-line animations of life in 1940s Hiroshima by Dave Packer, slithers of video from two hibakusha (Katsumi Takebu and Tomoe Kurogawa) who recount the impact and effects of the A-bomb in Hiroshima, and the pioneering inclusion of Woojer straps for the audience — immersive haptic belts (mainly used for gaming) worn around the waist with a big bass vibrating speaker that emphasise certain parts of Danny Bright’s score.

Throughout this 55-minute work, Minamimura’s ability to conjure deft emotional landscape is without peer; she is our sign mime medium holding these stories, passing them on to audiences and leaving us to reflect on the emotional enormity and human consequence of those fateful days in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Beautiful Game by Next Door Dance is ‘a laugh-out-loud look at Britain’s undying obsession with football, celebrating everything from weird match day rituals to ridiculous armchair punditry’ and has been selling out at the newly minted ZOO Playground; after a significant shift in the mainstream visibility and awareness of women’s football following this summer’s World Cup in France, The Beautiful Game — created by Jennifer Manderson in collaboration with Hayley Corah, Emily Thurston, Georgina Saunders and Laura Savage — is the perfect show at the perfect time to reinforce female-led football narratives and to continue the quest for gender equality in football.

Premiered in 2016, The Beautiful Game is a wholesome, 55-minute, whistlestop sketchbook of all the physical quirks, behaviours and customs associated with association football. From the faux semaphore of the ref’s assistants’ flags and stanning Beckham and Lineker to the mimetic accuracy of in-seat fans sit standing as their team ALMOST scores a goal. Next Door Dance has choreographically dissected and reassembled football into a theatrical work that is accessible and super family-friendly — although I would love to see an updated scene referencing VAR. It is heartening to see it tour to village halls, community centres and social clubs as the work has a disarming charm and Next Door Dance FC will continue to gather more fans over the coming months.

Working On My Night Moves by Julia Croft and Nishan Madhan — presented by Zanetti Productions — at the Old Lab (Summerhall) ‘breaks the rules, the patriarchy and the time/space continuum. It’s a search for multiple feminist futurisms, a gesture to the impossible and an ode to the search for utopia.’ It is presented as a live artwork but has an original choreographic sensibility, a clear movement score and enough things that look like dance (with Sarah Fister-Sproull as Movement Advisor) to warrant further inspection. 

Let us assume that the theatre is a patriarchal space; French feminist philosopher, Hélène Cixous, asks “How…can women go to the theatre without lending complicity to the sadism directed against [them], or being asked to assume, in the patriarchal family structure that the theatre reproduces ad infinitum, the position of victim?” Croft and Madhan take the bodies of their audience and herd them on stage behind a star cloth for the opening seven minutes in the first rebalancing of power. As the cloth is ripped from the rig, we are ushered into the seating bank which has piles of stacked chairs, ladders and lights which are taking up room in the positions that we thought were ours. 

Working On My Night Moves deals with the usurping of power and the anatomies of belonging; Croft and Madhan depatriarchalise the space and we look not at their bodies but at what their bodies achieve in the transformation of spaces and futures. With a consistent suite of retina burners they go about their business, exploding scenographic conventions by dangling seats (on a safety chain) above the audience, tailoring suits made of tinfoil, dropping parcans from the lighting rig dangling just above the floor and invoking some sort of poetic fever dream of Judy Garland’s Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. 

There is something delicious in their idea and execution; each night under the cover of darkness (to the tune of Bob Seger’s Night Moves and Carly Simon’s Nobody Does It Better) Croft and Madhan could enter every theatre space in the country, reconstruct it and shift the perceptions of those who enter it. Their strategies for a new feminist futurism are like the durational dance live-action version of Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter but with a better soundtrack.