CriticalDance Forum

A gaggle of reviews form Edinburgh:

Bird's Eye View
By Lyn Gardner for The Guardian

Russia's DO-Theatre, the company who brought us the legendary Hopeless Games, are back in town, and if this feather-light dance piece on the theme of flying, floating and crashing back down to land doesn't reach the heights (and lacks the originality) of that previous show, it is still a very playful piece of movement theatre.

It is delightful stuff. Technically flawless too.

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Two round-up pieces from the Festival Fringe:

Thinking out of the box
Fringe Dance: Pandora 88 - St Stephens, until Aug 19
Bird’s Eye View - St Stephens, until Aug 25
Stairway Of Fire - Gateway Theatre, until Aug 12
The Tango Spell - C Venue, until Aug 24
Brhannala - Augustines, until Aug 24
By Ellie Carr for The sunday Herald


It is common to describe Fringe shows as taking place in a cupboard. Well, Pandora 88 by Germany’s Fabrik company actually does. And makes a merit out of it.

Shrinking the available stage-space of cavernous St Stephens Church to a lift-shaft-sized Perspex box, dancer-actors Wolfgang Hoffman and Sven Till take us on a 60-minute journey through the human mind – with only a few metres of space between them. Apparently inspired by Brian Keenan’s An Evil Cradling and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, this is an involving, touching and funny study of incarceration, both physical and mental.

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Tap running hot and cold
Fringe Fusion Dance: Camut Band’S Life Is Rhythm - St George’s West, until Aug 17
Revolution: Sex, Dance And Rock’N’Roll - Demarco @ Rox Art House, until Aug 25
By Ellie Carr for The Sunday Herald


They’ve been described as the Catalan Tap Dogs. Thankfully, the Camut Band are far less shiny and manufactured than that. Filed under music in the Fringe programme, but with far more glorious hoofing than half the acts masquerading under “dance”, this Barcelona-based tap/percussion troupe are longer in the tooth than many of their counterparts – and all the better for it.
With a glimmer in their eye that says “been there, done it, enjoyed it”, these gleeful, gurning-faced, twinkle-toed male performers let rip.

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The Tango Spell
By Kelly Apter for The Scotsman

DANGLING cocaine and cash like a carrot to a donkey, the wealthy Master keeps his beautiful young lover Roxanne glued to his side. Addicted to both, Roxanne dances dutifully before him, emulating the fillies in his stable with delicate trots. Both feed off each other, until a handsome young suitor enters the frame, plunging them into a tragic love triangle.

A blend of tango, ballet and contemporary dance, Pasodos Dance Company’s Fringe debut is refreshingly innovative.

Actor Cathal Quinn’s brutish Master has us hooked from the start, setting the scene with a sneering monologue. The two lead dancers not only infuse Roxanne and her suitor with sexual chemistry, but demonstrate genuinely strong technique.

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The latest from the Edinburgh Festival:

Pandora 88
By Lyn Gardner for The Guardian

Two men. One box of roughly 1.5 sq m, about the size of a small lift. It doesn't sound all that promising, does it? But in the hands (or rather bodies) of Wolfgang Hoffman and Sven Till of Fabrik, who gave us the wonderful Fallen last year, this is one of the most captivating shows in Edinburgh. A small box becomes a whole world. Out of their terrible togetherness and more terrible aloneness, these two men find an accommodation, a strength and a tenderness so acute that watching it develop is like seeing open-heart surgery carried out on stage.

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Scottish Dance Theatre/ Freshmess - Innit ... Innat/Maintain /Award Winning European Dance
By Kelly Apter for The Scotsman

SET up in honour of the late Scottish Ballet founder, the Peter Darrell Choreographic Award offers a helping hand to promising young dance talent. Not through money or medals but through the opportunity to create a new piece for a professional dance company. This year’s winners, Victor Quijada and Beth Cassani took up residency at Scottish Dance Theatre’s Dundee headquarters - and the company’s Fringe production is the result.

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Fringe Performance: The thrill of flying
Bird's Eye View, Bigsmorgasbordwunderwork, Revolution, reviewed by MARY BRENNAN for The Herald

Bird's Eye View - The chap who recently spread his hi-tech wings and swooped across the Channel would feel distinctly at home in this piece. For Do Theatre's artistic director, Evgeny Kozlov, has devised a show that is so exquisitely obsessed with flight, you wonder if he is descended from Icarus.

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Thinking out of the box
Pandora 88, Brahannala, Joe . . . This Infinite Universe reviewed by MARY BRENNAN for The Herald

Pandora, you'll recall, was the minx who opened a mythological box and let mayhem loose. Luckily for mankind, hope chose to stay put. When Wolfgang Hoffmann and Sven Till are discovered, however, squeezed into a door-less cubicle, there seems no room for hope.

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Loft
St Stephens

Alice Bain
The Guardian

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Freshmess
Dance Base, Edinburgh

Alice Bain
The Guardian

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Stretched to the limit
By Donald Hutera

Cullberg Ballet
Islands in the Stream
There Where We Were

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A short review from the Fringe:

The Human Show
By Mary Brennan for the Herald

It's a minute to midnight and 12 people find themselves dressed for a party with nowhere to go. This is the starting point for members of the University of Nevada's Theatre and Dance Departments to put on crazy wigs, false noses, and angst-ridden personnas, and then go into their acting exercises.

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<small>[ 16 August 2003, 07:15 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

A string of reviews from the Fringe:


Fringe Dance/Physical Theatre
For The Sunday Herald Ellie Carr reviews "Islands In The Stream", "There Where We Were", "Aurora Nova", "Flamenco Flamenco!"


It has become almost a Fringe cliché to praise Derevo, the Russian “anti-clowns”, to the skies. But once again, with the beautifully conceived Islands In The Stream, these extraordinary performers take wordless physical theatre to previously unimagined heights.
The piece, a dream-like flux of images that drift tantalisingly in and out of view and imprint on the mind for days, has nothing to do with the Dolly Parton/Kenny Rogers song of the same name, but everything to do with the sea, and all who sail on her.

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Fringe
Jann Parry reviews Pandora 88 and Aurora Nova for The Observer

The finest Fringe venue for physical theatre is St Stephen's church, thanks to the Aurora Nova mini-festival there, now in its third year. Its director, Wolfgang Hoffmann, performs as one of two men-in-a box in Pandora 88.

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Dancing on the edge
Kelly Apter reviews AURORA NOVA

SOMETIMES the simple things in life have the most devastating effect.

Sitting alone at a table, Toni Mira struggles with a packet of biscuits. He scratches with his fingernails, pulls with his teeth, but still they won’t open. A trivial problem - but when you’re teetering on the edge, it’s enough to push you over. Or in Mira’s case, it’s the catalyst for 60 minutes of self-analysis; the empty stage a psychiatrist’s couch from which he confronts his own solitude.

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Mika Haka
By Diane Dubois for The Scotsman

FOR the first ten minutes of this show, I sat scowling like a po-faced academic, jotting worried little notes about "commodification of a culture" and "ethno-plunder on a grand scale". I was missing the point entirely. An evening of Maori song and dance given the full Vegas treatment (as in Las, not Johnny), this was never intended as a cerebral event.

The excitement in the house was what you might expect before a gig, or a pantomime, and Mika Haka was pretty much situated somewhere between the two. The music veers between chilled Ibiza, breaks and hip- hop, with a smattering of trance and camp classics chucked in for good measure. All this was structured round what I can only assume were originally some pretty sacred routines, before Mika gave them the Stock, Aitken and Waterman treatment.

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Camut Band's Life is Rhythm
By MARTIN LENON for The Evening News

IF you think tap dance is dead except in ill-conceived school shows where eight-year-olds dreadfully recreate On The Good Ship Lollipop, then clearly you haven’t seen Camut Band. Nor have you lived.

Tip, tip tapping on to the tiered stage, and on to a huge mic’d-up drum came Rafael Mendez displaying not just tap-mastery, but a real understanding of drama and dynamics.

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Review from The Times.

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And from The Guardian.

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And from The Independent.

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Two reviews from The Guardian.

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And.

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And from The Herald.

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Review from The Times.

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And from The Herald.

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How much can you cram in?

Endurance tests
A five-hour Korean opera? It may seem like a good idea to some, but it's little wonder the crowds are staying away. By Charlotte Higgins for
The Guardian

According to Brian McMaster, who runs the Edinburgh international festival, the average time a tourist stays in the city in August is just over nine days.
With that in mind, it's interesting to chart possible paths through the festival: in nine days you could see the entire Ring cycle and the complete Beethoven string quartets. If you stayed an extra week, you could do that, plus, say, Calixto Bieito's Hamlet, the Bordeux Opera Ballet's Picasso and Dance...

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Questions and dancers
Ismene Brown for The Daily Telegraph reviews White Cabin and Loft at St Stephen's Church and Chantier-Musil at the Playhouse:


If you're feeling out of sorts, lost the plot, can't find the meaning in life, go to Edinburgh. No need to seek out philosophers and psychoanalysts, when for £6 an hour the choreographers will do it for you, or at least enrage you out of your glumness.

In one day, between the Playhouse and the leading Fringe dance venue, St Stephen's Church, it is possible to see French, Spanish, German and two Russian takes on those great modern dance challenges, "Who am I? Why am I here? Is there any meaning to anything?"

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Edinburgh reports: frolicking in the foam
Ismene Brown for The Daily Telegraph reviews Derevo and Fabrik at St Stephen's:


If it was Derevo's capacity for horrifying us with glimpses from the maw of human hell that first grabbed my attention some years ago, now it is the capacity for almost unspeakable beauty on stage - made from very little - that adds to the exceptional appeal of this monkish quartet of shaven-headed Russian mime artists.

Their breathtaking Islands in the Stream is a positive seaside holiday in comparison with last year's home-made Dante circus, with sailors, admirals and bathing beauties instead of demons and lost men.

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High kicking up a storm
By Maxie Szalwinska for The Scotsman

Tamasha means "commotion" in Hindi and that’s exactly what the theatre company is hoping to create at the Edinburgh International Festival next week.

Their latest production, Strictly Dandia, is a tale of Hindu-Muslim love, billed as a cross between West Side Story and Strictly Ballroom with a Gujerati twist. The setting is the competitive world of the Navratri Festival; nine nights of celebratory dancing in Britain’s widespread Gujerati community.

Tamasha’s artistic directors, Kristine Landon-Smith and Shudha Bhuchar, spent months gathering first person testimony as the raw matter for "a very modern British story". Dandia, a kind of stick dance, is a huge phenomenon all over Britain. Young people turn out at gymnasiums, large halls and leisure centres dressed to the nines: "They plonk this shrine down in the middle and off they go," says Landon-Smith. "It’s ostensibly a very traditional, circular dance."

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Never the twain …
Festival Theatre: High passions, bare flesh, sectarian tension and hormones running rampant … all in the name of a religious Hindu dance festival. Ellie Carr for The Sunday Herald enters the world of Asian theatre.


It’s a bitterly cold November night on the streets of Wembley. Young girls, dressed in flesh-baring finery, hair lacquered artfully into shape, hang around sizing up the talent as they prepare to dance the night away.
It could be any group of teenagers, powering up for an evening of alcopops, hard house beats and furtive gropes. But this lot, British Gujarati youngsters marking the Hindu festival of Navratri – literally, “nine nights” of dancing – are rather more carefully supervised than that.

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Revolution: Sex, Dance and Rock'n'Roll
One small step away from starting a revolution. Preview by JACKIE MCGLONE

THE powers that be at ScottishPower have to be told about Joel Hanna and Mike Schulster. With their "sex, dance and rock’n’roll" show the two dancers - an Irish dancer and a tap dancer respectively - radiate some serious energy.

Vancouver-born Hanna, the son of an Irish father and a Filipino mother, is small and perfectly formed, with designer stubble, sleek black pony-tail, and size four-and-a-half feet. "I kept growing in other places, though," says the 25-year-old, with a wink.

Schulster, 23, is the perfect contrast to the fiery, black-clad Hanna. An all-American, Schulster’s a New Yorker born and bred. "It was a life of symphony concerts, opera and ballet. My sisters and my mom still ballet dance."

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<small>[ 24 August 2003, 03:38 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Edinburgh reports: dance rivals need more daring

Dominic Cavendish [The Telegraph] reviews Strictly Dandia at the King's Theatre

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Strictly Dandia - King's Theatre, Edinburgh
By Alastair Macaulay for The Financial Times


Just beneath the streetwise young British-Asian skin of Strictly Dandia eagerly pumps the silly heart of an predictable can-we- kids-ever-get-this show-on-the-road old Hollywood musical. You're scarcely bothered by the cultural conflict in the plot device that the lovely young Hindu woman Preethi is taking dishy young Muslim Raza as her Dandia dance partner and boyfriend, since Strictly Dandia (written for Tamasha Theatre by Sudha Buchar and Kristine Landon-Smith) cares no more about Hindu/Muslim tensions than it does about the fact that Preethi's dad Ketan is cheating on her mum Prema with his secretary.

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Strictly Dandia, King's Theatre, Edinburgh
By Lynne Walker for The Independent

Savagely murdered by its own hype, Strictly Dandia is most certainly not what it's drummed up to be. If there were "high passions, bare flesh, sectarian tension and hormones running rampant" in Tamasha Theatre's latest piece of dance-drama, based on the inter-caste boils erupting upon a religious Hindu dance festival, or "garba", they passed me by. Strictly Ballroom meets the world of Asian theatre it is not.

And in case the word "erupts" suggests some sort of spontaneous action, or even surface interest, let's just say that the meagre storyline and skeletal production could have been better devised and scripted by a bunch of teenagers.

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Birds Eye View, St Stephens
Blue Is My Colour, The Zoo, Kirk O'Field Parish Church, Edinburgh
By John Percival for The Independent

There I was, thinking that dance on the Fringe seems to have improved, that is until I found myself watching Blue Is My Colour. This is the daft story of an inept office worker seduced by a mermaid after his boyfriend has been drowned. The puerile text, dreary songs and banal movement are unutterably boring.

What a relief after that to find Birds Eye View.

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Herald Angels: United by their diversity
By KEITH BRUCE for The Herald (Glasgow)


THE last batch of Bank of Scotland Herald Angel awards celebrated the diversity that has become their hallmark when they were presented by the chairman of the bank, Sir Dennis Stevenson, at Edinburgh Festival Theatre on Saturday....The strength of the EIF dance programme was again recognised. The work of young British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon was given a unique showcase when three works, including a world premiere, were performed by San Francisco Ballet.

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