For six years the Fringe venue of choice for aficionados of international dance, physical and visual theatre has been Aurora Nova. It is possible to stay from late morning to past midnight and, flipping between two spaces, see nearly all of the baker’s dozen shows in a day.
This is a strong, although perhaps not vintage, year. One production that comes nearest to reaching that special place between head and heart is Sclavi: The Song of an Emigrant, by the Czech Republic’s Farm in the Cave International Studio. Drawing on authentic letters and fragments of polyphonic songs from Slovakia and Ukraine, a ravenously sensitive and physically electric cast of eight follows a poetic, rather than literal, plotline about the emigrant experience. In Viliam Docolomansky’s impressive staging, their collective voice is both howl and lullaby.
The sinewy, shaven-headed and near-naked members of the cultish Russian company Derevo are frequent Fringe visitors. Pitched somewhere between ecstasy and apocalypse, Ketzal is a typically phantasmagoric journey through the primordial jungles of the director Anton Adassinsky’s fevered imagination. He and six twitching, writhing acolytes run theatrically amok in a style that plays like a cross between a live Fellini film and Japan’s darkly imagistic butoh dance.
Knots, by Ireland’s Coiscéim Dance Theatre, is one of several works scrutinising the woes of coupledom. The springboard for this look at three Jacks and their equally iconic Jills was the director Liam Steel’s reading of a text by the psychoanalyst R. D. Laing. Tangled wordplay of the wanting-you-to-want-me-to-want-you variety is aligned to slick, bruising movement. A cast built like real people rather than stick insects puts across some familiar and, frankly, banal material with great skill. Ferdia Murphy’s striking set of mirrored cubicles aptly suggests changing room, confessional and cage.
Other venue highlights include three nasty but very funny Norwegian nuns in The Convent, the precise comic detail and wit of the UK three-hander Hysteria and the Portuguese director João Garcia Miguel’s terrifically askew portrait of Andy Warhol in Special Nothing.
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