This year’s offerings veer from visually stunning to ponderous as performers grapple with big ideas as well as each other’s bodies
festival as overstuffed with acts as Edinburgh brings on the worst kind of Fomo. You walk past a blur of superlatives and star-ratings on posters and think: where are these amazing shows and why haven’t I seen them? Of the dance and circus shows I sampled throughout the first week, hardly any were knockouts, but there were interesting ideas, visual stunners, some disappointments and a surprise.
Most interesting is a piece that tries talking about Aboriginal land rights through acrobatics. The title of Australian company Na Djinang Circus’sreferences the ritual of acknowledging the traditional custodians of land where performances take place. This circus trio – comprising one performer of Indigenous heritage, one descended from colonial settlers and one from a family of more recent migrants – are grappling with the meaning of it.
They gradually up the ante throughout the hour, with awe-inspiring arcs through the air, joyful soaring in single and double turns, twists and pikes. There’s a surprise move where they launch themselves upwards and suddenly point their legs to the ceiling as if they’re hanging upside down in the sky. This is all great. The show that goes around it, however, inspired by theatre ghosts, is the standard whimsy/slapstick of Francophone circus.
Often the disappointing festival shows are people starting out, testing ideas and gaining experience, but one of the bigger ones not to fly was, a company that does great work with young people in Colombia. While this spiegeltent production with a cabaret vibe had a distinctive Colombian R&B soundtrack , the shaping, the charisma and the crowd work didn’t catch fire, and the circus skills just weren’t up to the level you can see elsewhere in Edinburgh this month..
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