Tag Archives: Summerhall

Review: Metamorphosis

Hijinx

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Summerhall Online

25/08/21

What do you have in common with a ‘monstrous verminous bug?’

Before you indignantly shriek “Nothing at all! How dare you!?” and slam whatever device you are reading this on down and storm away insulted by the question, prepare yourself for worse – you may have more in common with it than you think.

Taking Kafka’s classic story of travelling salesman, Gregor Samsa, who finds himself transformed into some form of horrifying vermin and remains trapped on his back in his room as his family and colleagues live their lives around him, Hijinx take an inventive and entertaining look at parallels between the original text and the transformation we all underwent during Covid-19 lockdowns.

From a hilarious remote audition process, in which Lindsay Foster and her ring light momentarily steal the show, and directionless break-out room rehearsals to performance, the cast present a Zoom-play within a Zoom-play. As they prepare to present this play, it becomes clear that all is not right, and life begins to mirror fiction, with unsettling messages in the chat, flickers and cuts to characters seemingly undergoing transformations, and domestic spaces unsettled.

Punctuating and framing this story within a story, is the Kaf Bar, where the cheery barman invites the audience to chat, meditate with ‘the guru,’ enjoy a drink, and respond to existential polls. This is set as a friendly space outside the action of the place, but the changes of the play soon impinge on this space too, and like in other moments, the themes of Kafka’s work bleed into the ‘normal’ settings, shedding new light on the ideas of the original text.

The direction and design of the piece makes full use of the online setting, openly acknowledging the Zoom platform (and the challenges it brings) rather than pretending that it is not there. Director, Ben Pettit-Wade uses the production’s online platform to great effect in moments such as that in which a face is constructed, Frankenstein-like, from close up images of individual features of the cast, and in which the cast commit recorded faux-pas in a Zoom breakout room during rehearsal. In streaming the work live, Hijinx have also opened up a world of interactive possibilities for the audience, which are deftly handled by Owen Pugh as the Barman.

Treading the line between surreal and bizarrely real, Metamorphosis holds a theatrical mirror up to the transformations of the past year, and through laughter leads us to ask important questions about identity, care, isolation and connection.

Metamorphosis runs live at Summerhall Online until 29th August as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Review: Fow

Deaf & Fabulous/Taking Flight

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Summerhall Online

Almost all of the best drama in love stories boils down, in one way or another, to communication, or a lack of it – from Darcy’s ill-judged proposal, to Harry and Sally skirting around the edges of friendship for years. Fow is no different. Three characters, one speaking mainly Welsh, one using mainly British Sign Language, and one English, find their paths intersecting in unexpected ways and have to figure out how to overcome barriers in communication far beyond those posed by their respective languages.

Lissa is deaf, and the combination of living with her difficult Instagram-influencer housemate, lack of communication with her family and struggling in university has her on the defensive, so when Sîon accidentally stumbles into her life, he doesn’t get the warmest reception. However, as they spend more time together, and begin to understand each other, that changes. Throw in a surprise visit from Lissa’s chaotic older brother Josh, some spectacular arguments, and a romantic gesture that belongs in the Pantheon with John Cusack holding a boombox and Hugh Grant impersonating a member of the press, and you have all of the ingredients for a classic romantic comedy.

Though, like many other shows in the past 18-months, Fow was filmed on Zoom or a similar platform, it does not feel like it has lost theatricality in its transfer to a trio two-dimensional boxes. Using frames, backdrops, puppets and paper speech bubbles, Becky Davies’s design creates a theatrical space reminiscent of photo-story comic strips, making use of its confinement to Zoom-boxes. Such clever construction and adaptation is a hallmark of this show, with Alun Saunders’ script blending three languages to great effect and bringing the audience along on the journey of communication gaps, miscommunications and eventual understandings that the characters traverse.

The three performers, Stephanie Back, Ioan Gwyn and Jed O’Reilly, all deliver impressive and convincing performances, sustaining the energy of the work on screen for almost two hours, while never overcompensating and losing the easy, natural relatability of their characters.

Fow is a precise, insightful and entertaining play, which prompts us to question what language and love mean to us.

Fow is available to stream via Summerhall Online until 29th August as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Review: Taiwan Season Online Performances 2021 – A Glimpse of Taiwan

Summerhall

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Online On-Demand

***

Ai-sa sa

Tjimur Dance Theatre

“Peel away each layer
And behold what lies behind
Away it goes; tears well in your eyes
Off it falls; you can’t help but smile
Layers collapse; laughing, weeping intertwine”

At the core of Tjimur Dance Theatre’s Ai-Sa Sa is an awareness of balance, of stripping away layers to find the basic balance of things – red apple/green apple, laughter/tears, care/violence. Even in form, with its blend of filmed stage work and made-for-film scenes, Ai-sa sa holds balance at its heart.

No emotion lasts long in its portrayal on stage, and the four strong cast of performers (Ching-Hao Yang, Ljaucu Tapurakac, Tzu-En Meng, Sheng-Hsiang Chiang) flit naturally between contemporary dance, physical theatre and song. With a rapid, but not rushed, pacing, Ai-sa sa brings its audience on a colourful journey through the mercurial moods and shifting relationships of the characters on screen, deftly portraying themes of impermanence, changeability, and equilibrium.

Drawing its name from a modern Paiwan phrase, used as an interjection to laugh at your own attitude, Baru Madiljin’s exuberant work reminds its audiences to get over themselves and go with the flow – “Ai-sa sa, and shake it off!”

The Back of Beyond    

Tai Gu Tales Dance Theatre 

Another work which explores ideas of balance and equilibrium, Hsiu Wei Lin’s The Back of Beyond is an intense and absorbing work. Bringing together elements of both Eastern and Western aesthetics, choreography, ritual and spirituality, this work from Tai Gu Tales Dance Theatre composes cycles of birth, death and rebirth.

Opening with the dancers engulfed in shrouds which they will return to and cast off at several points in the performance, like chrysalides, The Back of Beyond takes a pace that is at times meditative, at others almost uncomfortably slow and at yet others, frenetic and unsettling. The company demonstrates skill and focus as an ensemble, sometimes breaking away into individual movement, but often moving as though part of a single powerful organism, lead by the heartbeat of the work’s entrancing elemental score.

Though not a work for those who like a pacy, direct narrative, The Back of Beyond (which was originally designed as an immersive live experience)is a captivating show in which you can lose yourself to the powerful choreography and the design which delves into the spaces between light and dark to mesmeric effect.

Fighters

Les Petites Choses Production

Based on a classical work of Chinese literature, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Nai-Hsuan Yang’s Fighters is a light-hearted work which examines dancers’ relationships with their bodies and minds in this global time of uncertainty and isolation. Where its source text is famously lengthy and complex, Fighters is a condensed fifteen-minute work which, even though I could not understand the narration or find subtitles, is engaging and accessible.

Staged in spaces that sit between the domestic and mythic, Fighters blends hip-hop and contemporary styles to create an entertaining new depiction of heroism, which many people will recognise after the past year of pandemic-life.

Touchdown

Incandescence Dance

A dance work based on physics, which culminates in a visual art installation was always going to catch my attention, but Hao Cheng’s Touchdown went beyond that and captivated me.

Asking the core question, “How can one entity be recognised as two things at once?,” Touchdown uses a discussion of the nature and action of electrons to delve into deceptively philosophical ideas. By flipping the camera angle, Cheng and the dozens of sticks of chalk around him initially appear to be magnetically attached to ceiling, and this sets the tone for the inversions, diversions and contradictions that will be uncovered in this twenty-minute work.

From using himself as a compass to draw concentric circles, to examining the history of concepts in physics, Hao Cheng draws his mathematical background into his choreography and in doing so finds new avenues of creative exploration, which address age-old questions in innovative ways.

All performances in the Taiwan Season are available online via Summerhall as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe from 6th August to 29th August 2021.

Eaten – Edinburgh Fringe Review

Summerhall, Cairns Lecture Theatre

24/08/17

eaten

Lionel the Lion is a lion with a dream; he wants to become a vegetarian. However, he has just eaten a human, Mamoru, with whom he forms a friendship as Mamoru sits in his stomach awaiting his inevitable digestion. As Mamoru and Lionel talk to each other, and to Suzi who (alongside other characters) teaches Lionel about food, digestion and nutrition, the audience is taken on a bizarre and unexpected exploration of how, why and what we consume in Eaten, developed by Mamoru Iriguchi.

This show presents some interesting theatrical ideas and raises intriguing questions, but ultimately its overall approach and the conclusions it drew left me with numerous questions. The production explored the well-worn phrase “you are what you eat” in a more literal sense than perhaps it was initially intended. The conclusion the show comes to seems to run along the lines of: once something or someone has been eaten, it or they live on as a parts of whatever creature did the eating, this is the natural order and it is acceptable, or even commendable to eat other animals as they have another life beyond the digestive juices of their consumer.  It is an interesting concept to explore, and building an awareness of what we consume is important, but overall as a play billed at ages 6+, it is a rather confusing production that creates more questions than it answers. This can be seen in the use of puppets which appear from the stomachs of the characters as characters such as Conceptual Cow and Conceptual Mamoru. While this is a fun dramatic technique and bred some amusing lines, it is (as demonstrated by the small voice that piped up from the front rows to ask her mother what the word “conceptual” meant) perhaps a technique which required its audience to have a bit more experience and knowledge than is within the reach of the younger members of the audience.  On the flipside, when the performers were delivering facts and information themselves, their delivery was often stilted, exacerbated by the fact that many lines were read directly from the script, creating a sense of detachment from the audience and each other.

That said, the audience were in stitches at many points; with audience members recruited as other animals, a performer playing a poo, and a giant lion costume full of surprises, the physical and scatological humour abounds. For the older members of the audience, some of the jokes that may not land with the young target audience are entertaining and smart, playing with a sense of self-awareness on the part of the performers.

Eaten  is a production which, though it introduces intriguing ideas and delivers some strong comedy, potentially overloads its young target audience with concepts and over-stretches its possibilities for exploration of the topics it tackles in the short period of time available.

Eaten runs until 27th August as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.