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.
What they demonstrate is absolute mastery of their art, Carnow especially – 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’re unaware because you’re lost in the flow. That’s 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’s like waking up, they’re wiping themselves down, the act’s 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’s also just the awesome talent.
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. “They go, ‘Huh! He’s fat! He can’t dance!” Chalal tells us in his show Bigger. He knows he’s a big guy, always has been, and he’s 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 – a section about how Chalal is obsessed with not spilling food on himself, because he’ll be judged in a way a slim person never would, is thought-provoking.
A big chunk of the fringe programme is made up of international delegations and there’s one dance show in this year’s São Paulo showcase: Border Bodies by choreographer Igor Gasparini and his company TF Cia de Dança. It’s the kind of dance you can zone in and out of – not necessarily a bad thing – contemporary, driven by mood, energy, pulse, flow and a gradually morphing percussion-driven soundtrack. It’s 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’s not unison, but it’s unified – 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.
There’s less peaceful utopia and more unchecked anger in Everybody’s 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’t yet quite honed the voice.
Swedish acrobats Axel Ahl and Sara Sanchez Runsten of the company Below Zero have their own grumbles and disagreements, but they’re 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’s 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’t catch her. Don’t worry, though, they work it out.
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’t really stand on their own, but two ladders together? That’s 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’s 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 – and not well served by its electronic score. It’s nice enough, but where’s the wow?
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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’s Circus Hub on the Meadows until 29 August. The Pieces by Aloft is at Underbelly’s Circus Hub on the Meadows until 29 August.
