Anyway.. good things come in 3. Especially if you are up for Week 3 Edinburgh Fringe. Here is your road map.
Spoiler Alert: Watch Us is a real couple exploring intimacy; MIR uses dance to investigate peace and violence; Agathi draws on refugee experience; and Ce de Lu’ is about siblings returning to the remains of a difficult childhood.
One More Beginning: Love, Peace and the Courage to Try Again
The pavements are wet, August has lost some of its swagger, and yet inside C aurora two new pieces are asking questions that sound suspiciously like beginnings: how do we get close to another person, and how on earth do we live alongside one another?
In Watch Us – Love, Fear, Intimacy, Sazo Performing Arts turn an actual relationship into artistic research. A real couple put closeness, trust, fear and failure under the lights, asking what intimacy means in a culture where we can be permanently connected and oddly lonely at the same time. There is something deliciously risky about that: love is difficult enough without giving it a lighting cue.
Then MIR pulls the lens dramatically wider. Its title plays on a Slavic word that can mean both peace and world, while Darja Reznikova and Sade Mamedova use an intense physical dance dialogue to ask how violence enters bodies, beliefs and relationships — and whether peace might begin at a much smaller scale than governments and borders. It doesn’t treat peace as a pleasant state we eventually reach, but as something active and fragile that people have to practise.
Perhaps that’s a good thought for the last wet stretch of August. Beginning again doesn’t always require a blank page. Sometimes it means looking differently at the person already standing opposite you.
Watch Us – Love, Fear, Intimacy, C aurora studio, 11:40
MIR, C aurora main house, 14:00
There is something gloriously contrary about opening a show when Edinburgh is already beginning to think about packing up.
What We Carry: Suitcases, Families and Things That Refuse to Stay Behind
Summer likes to pretend travel is easy. A suitcase, a train, a festival wristband, somewhere new. But some journeys carry considerably more baggage than Ryanair would allow, and two late-arriving C ARTS productions look at what happens when the past insists on travelling too.
Agathi – The Plight of the Refugee, from Singapore’s Apsaras Dance Company, brings Bharatanatyam together with theatre and poetry to tell human stories of displacement, identity and resilience. Inspired by artistic director Aravinth Kumarasamy’s own experience and drawing upon Tamil poetry and refugee voices, it deliberately asks us to look beyond the word refugee and encounter the individual lives obscured by it.
In Italy’s Ce de Lu’,. Two siblings repeatedly return to a mountain house containing the material and psychological remains of childhood. It is a horror story of sorts, although perhaps one of the oldest horrors is simply discovering that leaving somewhere doesn’t necessarily mean it has left you. The house is both refuge and prison, nest and den; family memory becomes something almost architectural, waiting in the rooms as the journey is in the opposite direction: home.
These aren’t cheerful little end-of-summer postcards. But together they offer something more interesting: we don’t begin again by travelling empty-handed. Home can be something lost, something escaped, something carried and something reconstructed. September may offer us a fresh diary, but human beings stubbornly arrive in it with August — and quite a lot else — still inside us.
Agathi – The Plight of the Refugee, C aquila temple
Ce de Lu’, C aquila studio
One Last Transformation: Porcelain Brides and a Candyman Who Won’t Stay in His Suit
If we’re going to have one final burst of summer, let’s not make it beige.
Bone China starts with a spectacularly nasty fairytale proposition: an artist murders his bride and turns her into a porcelain masterpiece. Unfortunately for him, she has opinions about this. Jingkun Chinese Arts combines the darker territory of Grimm with traditional Chinese opera aesthetics, physical theatre, percussion, face-changing and fire-breathing as the silenced woman returns to demand justice. Even a comedic thief gets involved. It sounds less like quietly seeing August out and more like August setting something on fire on its way through the door.
And then Iceland’s Candyman: A Creamylicious Burlesque Comedy offers transformation of a rather more joyous kind. Saint Edgar begins with the apparent orderliness of one suit and one tie before quickstep, jive, comedy and burlesque start peeling the layers away. What began as a first burlesque act apparently grew into something that refused to stay contained: a show about identity, liberation and the freedom found in dance.
That’s perhaps my favourite pairing of the six because both begin with the body being made into something other people expect to see — artwork in one, respectable suited figure in the other — before that body spectacularly refuses to cooperate.
And isn’t that rather Fringe?
You arrive with the thing you thought you were making. Three weeks later it has acquired another scene, five strange friendships, a review you disagree with, a prop you can’t possibly take home and an entirely different idea of what it might become next.
The rain can have Edinburgh back soon enough. For now, there is time for one more transformation.
Bone China, C aquila studio, 12:00
Candyman: A Creamylicious Burlesque Comedy, C aquila studio, evening
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