The Dancing Zoo

The over-bearing presence of rubbish male comedians at the Fringe – both on and off stage – makes contemporary dance a pretty hard sell. Isobel Cohen of Helix has faced this challenge by kicking off her Four Quarters with a spot of stand-up. Casually mocking both ballet and street dance, she begins by identifying the difficulties of being a choreographer before segueing into her tragic story of a boyfriend who, quite simply, didn’t get it. Cohen’s short dance responds to a recent birthday gift: a plastic basque in a child’s size. The frustration that she feels, and could hardly explain to the generous partner, is achingly evoked. While the story is sad, and the dance moving, Cohen leavens it with her ready, caustic wit. When she returns later in Four Quarters to perform a duet with a male dancer, it is unavoidable that this appears as a continuation of her domestic conflict. Helix have found a good format: four pieces, all different, all quick. If the second, Where the Humans Eat, is vague, the rest of the bill is strong: variously witty and serious, but all spiced with a lightness of touch for added charm. Trapped, by Tilted, is more hardcore. It claims to be a comment on modern CCTV culture, but is really just a story about East German communist oppression. If Tilted hoped to draw parallels, they failed: the content is too specific to that regime, and the marches, surveillance and sense of the state’s tendrils snaking around through file and microfiche is so effectively portrayed that it is hard to extract any universal point. Yet it is still wonderful: the pas de trois between the state’s operatives and their victim, the clambering dance to escape the rising secret files, the finale where a new wall replaces the one so recently destroyed by an uprising. The spoken word passages do belabour the point, and the choreography doesn’t trust itself enough to be the driving force behind the story – hence the phone call interludes and dialogues. Nevertheless, it gets to the heart of the surveillance culture more effectively than any scripted drama is likely to. Despite two years of Fringe success, 2Faced were in danger of becoming stale. The pleasure of State of Matter came from a b-boy showmanship that was equal parts breath-taking acrobatics and sweaty, toned male torsos. Thankfully, artistic director Tamsin Fitzgerald has responded to this by making a quantum leap into a rounded stagecraft and purposeful intensity. Still Breathing is not only a display of powerful technique; it is expressive, thoughtful and harrowing. The bounding and spinning haven’t disappeared, but they are tempered by a brooding menace, a stunning lighting set and a brilliant soundtrack. If the spirit of the Fringe lies in risk-taking, artistic adventure and high quality on a low budget – and not shit comedians telling us how life really is – then 2Faced Dance are its physical manifestation. Still Breathing begins with the swagger and pose that characterised State of Matter: but this is merely establishing the style. Suddenly, the company are plunged into conflict and despair. They hurl themselves at each other, into the floor, off the set and across the stage from a vibrant anguish, as if casting off the haunting despair that the murky lighting spreads over the bodies. Early displays of male prowess give away to hunted expressions and hunched bodies, until the finale, when the cast are literally penned in by lighting towers, twitching and cowering, trapped and deformed. Plenty of companies claim to experiment. Plenty of companies make high claims for their work. 2Faced deliver, and are driving the current trend for masculine, macho dance deeper into itself, exposing the frailties behind the peacocking and hustling. This is marvellous choreography, fierce, bitter and brutal that takes the potential for total theatre seriously. It captures dance’s ability to create stark iconic images, and wrests beauty from anger and hopes without wistfulness, never flinching at the horror of the isolation it expresses.