There are more shows at the fringe than you could ever watch, but that hides the fact that artists and venues are struggling with rising costs and funding cuts. Edinburgh’s Dance Base, a year-round arts organisation, announced it was reducing its activity earlier in the year, and for the festival is presenting a slimmed-down programme in association with Assembly. What hasn’t changed is the eclectic mix of local and international artists, and work that surprises, delights and disappoints, sometimes all in the same show. (Dance Base also hosts a poignant photographic exhibition of dancers living in Ukraine, which is worth checking out if you’re nearby.)
One of the best current shows is Bettina Szabo’s Habitat (★★★★), a solo that rests on one incredible prop, a spiky sculpture made from of 600 paper cones, like a long origami cape, or Issey Miyake’s take on a hedgehog costume. It looks unassuming laid on the stage as Szabo slowly flexes and unfolds her body, moving side-to-side, a hermit crab looking for its next home. She’s miked up, and her increasingly urgent breaths form part of the ambient soundscore. When she finally finds her new shell you hear long exhales of relief, breath catching at the bottom of her lungs – it’s these kind of close details that really make the piece. Once Szabo is inside the sculpture, made by artist Jacinthe Derasp, it seems to have its own life; shapeshifting from snoozing beast to puffer fish to armadillo to sharp-toothed monster to feathery exotic bird to a designer version of Jabba the Hutt. It’s remarkable to watch the possibilities.
The use of lighting, inside and outside the costume, conjures up the pastel glimmer of northern lights and the flames of a forest fire – a reminder of those fleeing their homes and destroyed habitats, looking for sanctuary, like the hermit crab, or crossing borders to new lives, like Szabo, who moved from Uruguay to Montreal and made this piece to engage with her experience of migration. It all moves at meditative pace, but there’s a world of quiet wonder in the manipulation of this one piece of folded paper.
Elsewhere, there’s weirdness afoot in Double Goer (★★★) (the literal translation of doppelganger) from New Zealand’s Foster Dance. Uncanniness is intended – the cast is two similar-looking women, with matching long brown hair and black knickers – but more than that, there are flashes of the bizarre and unexpected. Inside a ring of neon lights, the two women are entwined in a conjoined bundle, feet sticking out in all directions. What’s the dynamic here? Co-dependent, proprietorial, passionate? Are they lovers, siblings, rivals, some kind of hybrid creature, or two sides of the same person?
Dancers Rose Philpott and Tamsyn Russell move in strong rhythmic unison, thrashing their hair, like a more naked, earthier version of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas Danst Rosas. Whether we’re watching some battle of the id and ego, the balance of yin and yang, the triumph of an alpha female, a shedding of innocence, is unclear. It’s a piece that for all its strong shapes and rhythmic repetitions is full of ambiguity: a dancer’s hand covering the other’s face could be tender, could be violent. But its unexpected turns – a death, a skeleton, two eccentric outfits Grayson Perry would be proud of – are what keep things interesting.
A local talent, Katie Armstrong, who appears as part of the Made in Scotland showcase with a double bill, Sketches/Glisk (★★), proves herself a capable choreographer but one who hasn’t yet found an original voice. Her desire to work with live music is exciting, and there’s lots of it here, from a quintet of strings, led by violinist Fay Guiffo, to electronic composer and turntablist Mariam Rezaei, all of whom share the stage with the dancers in Sketches, inspired by and set partly to Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor, with Rezaei providing a startling sonic contrast to the baroque composer.
The string players promenade around the stage as they play, and are lightly manipulated by the dancers. Armstrong’s not the first choreographer to have her dancers interact with musicians on stage and it’s a tricky prospect, making that interaction meaningful: what do they add to each other’s presence, how does one enlighten the other’s art? It also makes for a crowded space, which perhaps stops the dancers from going full-out. The choreography is somewhat lacking in inspiration. It’s precise, polite and straight-edged, keeping its firm angles and control even when Rezaei’s music gets frenetic.
Later, in Glisk, we might be hearing something like the drum solo from the film Whiplash, but what we’re watching is bloodless. And fair enough if that’s the contrast you want to make, just as Bach butts up against sonic experimentalism in Sketches, but it feels as if that relationship with the music and the choreography itself needs developing. Let’s hope the funds and opportunities remain in place for Armstrong to do so.
At Dance Base, Edinburgh, until 27 August
