Dance Base announces its Fringe programme
Edinburgh’s year-round home of dance announces Dance Base Festival, its programme for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which this year features 21 shows from 12 countries
Dance Base Festival returns to the Fringe this year with a programme linked by a sense of connection and identity.
Performers from Canada, India and Korea will come to Edinburgh along with closer to home companies from Scotland, England and Ireland for a wide-ranging programme that reflects Dance Base’s international reputation.
“Dance is a language that everyone is able to understand – the magic of the body tells us stories about life, conveying the subtlest and the most visceral experiences of the wonderful human condition,” says Morag Deyes, Dance Base’s artistic director. “This year, we see the tragedies and the comedies of humanity, often in the same show, as seen and felt across this complex, beautiful planet. Prepare to be moved, delighted, surprised, shaken and stirred!”
A highlight looks to be the New Contemporary Arab Dance Performances series, a weekend of work from three choreographers from Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine, including Dance Base Associate Artist Farah Saleh. Curated by Nedjma Haj Banchelabi, the pieces will look at the challenges artists face to perform.
The two Taiwanese shows in the programme – Kuo-Shin Chuang Pangcah Dance Theatre’s 038 and Chen-Wei Lee x ART B&B’s Together Alone – also caught our eye. The former’s title comes from the telephone area code for Haulien on Taiwan’s East Coast, home of the indigenous Pangcah people, and we’re told this contemporary performance is “underpinned with traditional spirit that asks the question, ‘Where is home?’” Meanwhile, in Together Alone, described as a “beautiful and vulnerable creation,” two dancers, performing nude, are tasked with never letting go of each other to create “an intimate show that explores relationships.”
From relationships with each other, to relationships with the land, Guwahati-based dancer and choreographer Shilpika Bordoloi presents Majuli, a solo celebration of the social, cultural and spiritual life of the river island of Majuli.
There's also a collaberation between Canadian choreographer Bill Coleman and avant-garde composer Gordon Monahan for Dollhouse, a show that “combines tap dancing, performance art, and a unique live-score and is set in an object-laden room, that collapses and breaks at the touch, portraying Coleman as a figure whose world is literally falling in around him.”
A couple of Dance Base Festival's shows are inspired by the Bard. First there’s John Scott Dance’s evocative re-interpretation of Lear with a gender-reversed cast. Part of the Culture Ireland Showcase, it features dance legend Valda Setterfield as the King. The other Shakespeare-inspired piece is Lady Macbeth: unsex me, a dance piece which we’re told “explores the ambition, power and remorse of Shakespeare’s most complex woman.”
Sticking with a literary theme is James Wilton Dance’s Moby Dick-inspired Leviathan. The seven dancer piece based on the Herman Melville novel is described as a performance about “man versus nature", and it'll feature the company's trademark of athletic dance, martial arts, capoeira and partner-work.
Other highlights look to be Keira Martin’s comic and heart-warming Here Comes Trouble; Julie Cunningham's To Be Me, which has gender as a focal point; Poyo Rojo's energetic Un Poyo Rojo, which is set in an empty locker room and features two male dancers wrestling, using acrobatics and physical comedy to "distort the expectations of manhood"; Old Kent Road’s Fall Out, described as a quintessential tap dancing show, set to a live jazz performance; and site-specific company Oceanallover present Sea Hames, a promenade piece that fuses performance, live-music and costume design to explore the iconography of the horse, the plough and they land.
For a full list and details of Dance Base Festival's 21 shows, head to dancebase.co.uk
Tickets for Dance Base shows are available through the Edinburgh Festival Fringe website, ahead of the full Fringe brochure launch on Wednesday 7 June, and Dance Base thereafter,where you'll find details of all 21 shows in the Dance Base Festival.