With brute strength and beauty, party tricks and personal revelations, this year\u2019s dance and circus programme has ambition and a spirit of togetherness<\/p>\n
If you want to be wowed by technical prowess, I recommend taking a trip to see a couple of New York pole dancers, Donna Carnow and Gina Alm, in their Edinburgh fringe show Dusk\/Night\/Dawn. The pair are wildly impressive performers with just one piece of apparatus, a hanging pole suspended above the stage, on which they climb and spin and balance seemingly on thin air and origami their limbs into impossible shapes, swimming and spiralling through the shadows in mesmerising fashion.<\/p>\n
What they demonstrate is absolute mastery of their art, Carnow especially \u2013 a former dancer and US Pole Art champion. The movement is utterly fluid, despite the brute strength required; the physics of it is so finely tuned but you\u2019re unaware because you\u2019re lost in the flow. That\u2019s what a great performer does, and Dusk\/Night\/Dawn is in part about performance. At one point their two bodies are writhing under flashing red light, smeared with black paint, and then suddenly the lights come up and it\u2019s like waking up, they\u2019re wiping themselves down, the act\u2019s over. There are all sorts of slippery questions about the dissolving line between person and performer, the nature of fantasy, the pleasure of discovering the power of your own body, and there\u2019s also just the awesome talent.<\/p>\n
Technical skill, of course, comes in lots of different packages, some of them unexpected. When French dancer Sofiane Chalal gets on stage, people often gasp. \u201cThey go, \u2018Huh! He\u2019s fat! He can\u2019t dance!\u201d Chalal tells us in his show Bigger. He knows he\u2019s a big guy, always has been, and he\u2019s always been a dancer too because he can move, with thrust and precision, arms flying swiftly through stop-start poses. He dances like a man with something to prove, and one who wants to entertain (beyond hip-hop, he names Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy as influences). The 35-minute piece is more like a work in progress at the moment, a series of party pieces, but there are some thoughtful voiceovers that hint it could be more \u2013 a section about how Chalal is obsessed with not spilling food on himself, because he\u2019ll be judged in a way a slim person never would, is thought-provoking.<\/p>\n
A big chunk of the fringe programme is made up of international delegations and there\u2019s one dance show in this year\u2019s S\u00e3o Paulo showcase: Border Bodies by choreographer Igor Gasparini and his company TF Cia de Dan\u00e7a. It\u2019s the kind of dance you can zone in and out of \u2013 not necessarily a bad thing \u2013 contemporary, driven by mood, energy, pulse, flow and a gradually morphing percussion-driven soundtrack. It\u2019s a slow build of a piece for eight dancers, from strained, static poses and the feeling of people under pressure, to joints being slowly oiled, into organic waves of movement. It\u2019s not unison, but it\u2019s unified \u2013 spurred by the same rhythm, ruled by the same centre of gravity. The theme is connection across diversity, and this company certainly shows that. The movement itself stops being interesting after a while, but it does build to something, and there is a sense of release by its sweaty, exhausted ending, a togetherness that seeps into the audience too.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s less peaceful utopia and more unchecked anger in Everybody\u2019s Got a Bomb, which erupts into violence partway through: a throat cut, a piercing assault of primal screams, wrestling and shoving and railing against the world in general. Elsewhere though, the dance itself is a bit polite and could do with more reckless and explosive firepower. Choreographer Riley Fitzgerald, a former dancer with Sydney Dance Company and Ballet National de Marseille, has clearly got the ideas and ambition, but hasn\u2019t yet quite honed the voice.<\/p>\n
Swedish acrobats Axel Ahl and Sara Sanchez Runsten of the company Below Zero have their own grumbles and disagreements, but they\u2019re played out in a much quieter way in their supremely gentle show Pace, which has some lovely moments. The act they do, hand-to-hand acrobatics, is based on the simplest of connections but there\u2019s a good bit where the couple cease to connect, plagued by petty irritations and missed communication. At one point she throws herself at him and he just doesn\u2019t catch her. Don\u2019t worry, though, they work it out.<\/p>\n
Chicago circus company Aloft have a really good concept and some cool props for their show The Pieces. Each of the six performers has a metal ladder. The ladders can\u2019t really stand on their own, but two ladders together? That\u2019s more stable. And with multiple ladders slotted together you can really start to build something. The metaphor for cooperation and community is not that subtle, but it works, and there\u2019s a great moment where all the ladders make a giant wave shape, with an acrobat riding its crest. All in all, though, the result is rather underwhelming \u2013 and not well served by its electronic score. It\u2019s nice enough, but where\u2019s the wow?<\/p>\n
Dusk\/Night\/Dawn is at Assembly Roxy until 30 August. Bigger is at French Institute in Scotland until 29 August. Border Bodies is at Assembly @ Dance Base until 30 August. Pace is at Underbelly\u2019s Circus Hub on the Meadows until 29 August. The Pieces by Aloft is at Underbelly\u2019s Circus Hub on the Meadows until 29 August.<\/p>\n