Dykegeist @ Summerhall

The grey, concrete space of the Biscuit Factory fills with an eclectic crowd of people who’ve made the trip out of the central huddle of Edinburgh’s Fringe venues for Dykegeist. The piece is the brainchild of Manchester-born, London-based artist Eve Stainton, who has worked with musician Mica Levi to build a surreal, collaborative experience that is “unravelling and complicating the archetypal narratives assigned to the lesbian predator creature”. 

Early in the show, there is a minor kerfuffle as the artist points in open-mouthed joy at a spider crossing the floor. While Stainton dances on, a series of rescue attempts are made by various audience members, culminating in the spider’s successful evacuation from the performance space inside a plastic beer cup. This interlude, although unplanned, might as well have been one of the collaborative vignettes that make up the show, in which the artist moves in spoken and embodied dialogue with individual audience members and the group as a whole. 

Later, in mirrored glasses and mic’d shoes, Stainton stalks through the crowded room. The shoes are a stroke of brilliance, especially in a flat space such as this where it is often difficult to see exactly what the artist is doing as they move around. The approach to individual audience members is in a way predatory, but almost playing at it – the predation is a shared game in which no one is in real danger. Stainton is clearly going out of their way to seek explicit consent and enthusiastic participation, which means whispered conversations with the audience members they approach, including cryptic, explanatory hand gestures. As an onlooker, suddenly on the outside, the anticipation is palpable and the intimacy profound. 

The vignettes themselves are often bizarre and abstract, but Stainton’s charisma and sense of humour prevent the piece becoming so odd as to be alienating. Whether dancing or prowling, they flow effortlessly between creepy, funny, erotic, and playful, bouncing off the energy of the audience and the excellent soundscapes provided by Levi. Whether you end up as a co-performer or an onlooker (which is really only a different kind of performer), Dykegeist is an exploration of just how far the question of who is doing what to whom can be twisted, flexed, and turned upon itself in the service of reimagination. 

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Dykegeist, The Biscuit Factory, run ended