It’s funny, this show. Maybe not from the off, when you’re just wondering what on earth’s going on, but the performers – three of them, all playing characters called Andrea – have a way of gradually winning you over, mainly with silliness and a sense of us all being in cahoots. Their somewhat gormless appearance helps: moustaches and curly wigs raise a smile.
The show’s creator, Simone Mousset, is a young Luxembourger choreographer who trained in London. She currently works between the UK, France and Luxembourg, where she is picking up interest in her hard-to-pin-down brand of dance theatre. The Passion of Andrea 2 (an imagined sequel, don’t worry about the backstory) is devised with three very likable performers, Lewys Holt, A de la Fe and Bryn Thomas, who quickly turn from genial to competitive to homicidal, short-circuiting at the first sign of unease or any perceived slight and rebooting to start all over again.
They pull the audience into their antics in what is an elaborate, absurdist party game, complete with Pythonesque surrealism, improvised tangents, fairly impressive singing and a fair amount of – technical term – pratting about. What’s enjoyable is to share in their glee and their spirit of creation, the pleasure in seeing one performer pick up another’s thread and run with it, whether humming a harmony, a bit of wordplay or a dance move.
The work’s purpose is trickier to fillet out from the fun and games: is there something bigger going on here? It might be a deconstruction of the hero narrative; it might be about how we obsess over our own tiny lives and petty power struggles when really we’re specks in the universe; it might be about the consequences of acting out extreme reactions to mild discomfort. There’s some mild mocking of contemporary dance itself, as the trio sing their way through a dance sequence: “Pretend to be a corkscrew!” “Expressive arms!”
This is amusing, well-crafted, convincingly performed nonsense. But it’s hard to argue it truly goes much deeper than that.
At Assembly @ Dance Base, Edinburgh, 13-25 August
