Dance
Dreamscapes,
Famous Grouse House
Mary Brennan
THREE pieces and all with a different sense of another landscape. Jane Mason ties yellow ribbons in her hair and enters the watery realms of shipwreck, her words and movements a delicate musing on past danger and the ongoing sleep of dissolution as hulls rust on the seabed. Anna Krystek - in like-banded semi-darkness and silence - explores stillness and gradation in Zer-o, her absolute poise in untoward balances giving way to sequences where tiny, incremental steps suggested unseen, opposing forces. Her technique - her control, the streamlined structure of her works - draw you into another dimension where time does seem to run differently . . .
Andy Howitt's Memory Palace - the longest piece in this Dance Base programme - is as much art installation as dance. Inspired by the ethereal voice of the late Billy MacKenzie, the piece uses a jute floor cloth, an azure backdrop, a skeletal shed and eight white whippets (finely detailed full size casts) as a framework for Howitt's movement. At present the installation - and the excellent use he makes of its component parts - seem to dominate and limit the dance. There is a powerful opening section, graced with the strengths that Howitt melds into his movement, but each subsequent dance section harks back to this initial vocabulary without developing it quite in tandem with the shifts and tensions in MacKenzie's life. With so much striking visual imagery - and Howitt's own, obvious, feeling for his subject - this could be the dance he wants it to be . . . if he now takes time to push it a
little further.
Music
Schumann At Large,
St Andrew's and St George's
Kenny Mathieson
WHETHER by accident or design, Michael Lester-Cribb's Schumann recital coincided with the rather more high profile performances of his Symphonies in the International Festival. The pianist's programme note acknowledged his own reservations on Schumann's solo piano music, but he proved a positive advocate in his stamina-sapping performances. The pianist admitted to seeing the four works (Humoreske, Op. 20; Symphonic Studies, Op. 13; Carnival in Vienna, Op. 26; and the great Fantasy, Op. 17), as the equivalent of a single giant sonata. His assault on them was stirring stuff, but four helpings of Schumann in a single sitting is not the most digestible fare, and an alternative flavouring might not have been amiss.
Theatre
One Lump or Two,
Balmoral Hotel
Mark Fisher
IT starts with the promise of a new Dame Edna, but delivers only Hinge and Bracket. As the audience waits on Princes Street, a silver Rolls Royce pulls up and, to hearty applause, out steps a queenly Lady Margaret (aka Ralph Oswick), a bundle of bossiness, bonhomie, and in-bred superiority, her over-privileged nephew Penkivil (Christopher Dickens) in tow. There's an air of subversion as the assembled mass of fringe-goers parade through the genteel lobby of the Balmoral, the joke neatly extended to the provision of tea, coffee, and cucumber sandwiches, and Lady Margaret's snappy banter with audience and staff alike.
But there the subversion ends. In Natural Theatre Company's latest show, Oswick and Dickens sing us a set of vaguely topical songs (about the Millennium Dome, Pinochet, and the Edinburgh Fringe) which are mildly amusing, but short on clout. You can't accuse them of over-staying their welcome, they fill a happy 50 minutes, but the best part of their energy has been invested in the least interesting aspect of the show.
Physical Theatre
Deadly, St Bride's
Mary Brennan
DANCE fans will remember when Eurocrash hit the stage, and every relationship breakdown or crisis of passion was taken care of in a series of rapid fire bodyslams or just-in-time flying catches. And then the circus came to town: and the catches took place overhead, on the trapeze . . . in some shows this was simply an eye-catching novelty, and not always done with much skill or daring - but in Deadly you have two performers who are truly accomplished aerial artists, and a concept which makes these skills an integral part of the show, not just a bit of window dressing.
Within the framework of a volatile relationship (portrayed by Deborah Pope and Rodrigo Matheus), the seven deadly sins are given rein in turn, with lust climbing the heights in a cunning and slithery trapeze act, where the bare-chested pair entwine in quite amazing lovers' knots. But even when grounded, they show strong and dramatic skills.Their gorging on each other's flesh - not unlike lyric vampires - is erotic, yet dark and disturbing. But passion dulls, and their closeness fragments, but not before Pope, in a blaze of energy, has truly put the sparkle back into the theatre-circus genre, her mobile glitter-glistening body living up to the company title, No Ordinary Angels.
Music
Andrew Bain Quartet,
Church Hill Theatre
Rob Adams
This group of young jazz musicians have given themselves the unenviable task of trying to pull a weekday audience out to Morningside Road at two o'clock in the afternoon. Two o'clock in the morning might almost be easier, but holidaymakers, flexi-timers and general loose enders should definitely check them out. Their repertoire refreshingly eschews the usual jazz rites of passage in favour of the soul-jazz of Kenny Garrett, the groove of McCoy Tyner's Passion Dance, an introspective Kenny Wheeler ballad, and a dancey, African-flavoured original by alto & soprano saxophonist Max Wild, and they play it with skill, creativity, sensitivity, ambition, and boyish enthusiasm. A musically accessible diversion from the High Street hustlers and leafleteers.
Music
Bag O'Cats, Famous Grouse
Rob Adams
Dick Lee seldom engages in the ordinary or the predictable. But even by that criterion Bag O'Cats is, er, extraordinarily unpredictable. Pitting Lee's clarinets, saxophones, and flutes with various pipes, cittern, whistles, myriad percussion, hammer dulci mer, a mandolin-sitar hybrid, and double bass - all played by musicians of as inquiring a disposition as Lee - produces a veritable wonderworld of flavours, sounds, tunes, and time signatures.
Highlights? In this space? Don't be daft. Just take my word for it that this reeling, raga-ing, swinging, swaggering hotline from the Himalayas, via the Balkans, to Cairngorm is the bees' knees. And come to think of it, the best bit is, their best may still be to come.
Theatre
Luke Back in Anger, C too
Robert Thomson
LIGHT years away from satire, at least a galaxy distant from spoof, jacknife's version of the Star Wars saga is pure pantomime. No, really. There are a couple of dames, a principle boy, boos, hisses and ''behind yous'', constant corniness, and popular songs with the lyrics changed. The level of humour is juvenile to say the least, the pun in the title being about as good as it gets, and though the simply silly has its place, you wouldn't want to be sitting through this without some alleviating alcohol in your system. As princesses Lea and Perrins, Jonathan Tanner and Paul Litchfield have a sure touch and the rest of the cast at least attack it with gusto. Someone, however, should point out to Ben Morris, as baddie Silence Waders, that audience asides in proper pantomime combine the spontaneous with some careful scripting and rehearsal. Pointless chummy chatter to the front row just annoys.
Music
Sakatumbe, St John's Hall
Rob Adams
Touching on both etymology and entomology, Sakatumbe, like Afridonia's Magic of Africa, is a gently persuasive local production with a message at its heart, in this case one of equality and the need for humility.
Makossa, we learn, is a word with three meanings, two of them nice, while the difference between anansi and a nancy is that one's a smelly caterpillar and the other isn't.
The troupe of percussionists, drummers, dancers, storytellers, and jokers spread their message with hospitable glee, although non-participation in the ''let's see how many people we can get on the stage'' finale carries a threat of the third makossa. It's an enema and a quick straw poll revealed that everybody preferred dancing.
Dance
Mimi la Sardine,
Famous Grouse House
Mary Brennan
I'M at something of a loss to know why Wendy Buonaventura - who dances so eloquently and with such a zest for the rhythms and nuances of Arabic dance - should end up shackling herself to a narrative format that is (unlike herself, or her dancers) stiff and creaky.
On paper it's a merry enough idea: reminiscences of a former dancer - the Mimi of the title - which will act as introductions and scene-setters for the dances themselves. But the allure of these anecdotes and comments is sadly whammied by the arch, stilted delivery of the actress who delivers the humour with such a heavy hand, the fun goes out of it.
This drains some of the energy from what should be a cracking show: Buonaventura's own delectable sinuosity in the guise of Salome, the intriguing parody of a macho guy strutting his leery stuff, the impact of ensemble shimmies . . . though these did bland out into oddly characterless wafting when the music strummed over into flamenco guitar. If you do go, shut your ears to the script, and enjoy the various high points of the dance - of which Buonaventura's solos are the tops.
Music
Bruce Mathiske,
Famous Grouse House
Rob Adams
In the Fringe's competitive climate nobody will blame Bruce Mathiske for trying to sell tickets. The Aussie guitar picker seems a really nice fella and I wouldn't wish to deny him an audience. However, I don't hear in his admittedly able, and presumably much sweated-over, playing, the fluency or consistency of touch that would mark him out as the promised guitar sensation.
Martin Taylor or Adrian Legg he's not. But he has put together a broad repertoire, ranging from jazz standards by Waller, Gershwin and Rollins, and gypsy music, to self-confessedly flashy originals. The latter, if a
little crude, can be quite hair-raising; the former, though, are sufficiently stiff to warn guitar fans to approach by all means, but with realistic expectations.
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