Song and dance for the ages
herself, an array of black North American women whose attire places them at various stages within the past century.
If there’s any one element of this dance piece by singer and dancer Neema Bickersteth which doesn’t transmit emphatically, it’s the advertised mission to fully encompass the experience of black women throughout that period of time. There are strong suggestions, certainly, not least a very powerful early sequence where Bickersteth appears in grey fatigues and headscarf, whistling out a delicate lament with a minimum of movement, captured amid a tortured point in black American history. In short, this piece isn’t so much a documentary evocation of events from the past as it is an emotional expression of the weight of history which Bickersteth feels behind her.
On this score it truly delivers. She is a dancer of effortless physicality and weightless grace, and her operatic soprano voice is a rich, otherworldly instrument.
There are no words in her performance, only the vocalisation of sounds which emulate words, with a collection of hums and whistles which coalesce into tunes.
Presented by the Torontobased Volcano Theatre in
0 Neema Bickersteth dances with the weight of history on her shoulders yet still with weightless grace association with Canadahub, the piece – which is much more dance than theatre, despite the Fringe programme’s positioning of it amid the latter – is directed by Ross Manson and choreographed by Kate Alton.
All concerned, including live musicians Gregory Oh and Ben Goodman, who plays music by composers from Rachmaninoff to Cage, contribute something essential and atmospheric to the piece, yet it’s Bickersteth’s presence which binds them together with real, contemplative grace and power.
DAVID POLLOCK bond in song and dance a – remarkably chaste – relationship blossoms (The Shape Of Water this is not). Suspension of disbelief is nicely achieved by Lisa Milinazzo’s elegant direction in tandem with Llabrés’ understated performance. Rather than heavily emphasise Annwn’s otherness, Llabrés simply suggests it with a graceful move here or there and her own striking singing voice. Blakeley’s script spends a little too much time on the getting-to-know-you business so there’s a bit of a crunching change of gears when plot twists come into play but this is a gently affecting piece, as sweet and salty as a kiss on the beach at dusk.
RORY FORD
Until 25 August. Today 8:45pm. Sweet Grassmarket (Venue 18) JJJJ
Fife-based playwright John Mccann was sitting in a pub on Edinburgh’s Clerk Street with a friend when the conversation turned to politics. Specifically, the politics of his “home home” in Northern Ireland, which made him angry; although not so much at the situation in the country, with its lack of government and the fact that the right-wing Democratic Unionist Party had entered into a supply and confidence agreement to keep the Westminster Conservative Party in power since 2017.
Instead, Mccann was infuriated by the realisation that members of the public in Great Britain knew little of the political figures and arguments of the place he’s from.
So he set out to speak to insiders whose words could help him present a picture of where Northern Ireland stands now and what the future might hold for it.
Unlike his 2014 debut play, the Scottish Indyref-concerned Spoiling, DUPED is a partly verbatim piece performed by Mccann himself.
It’s a presentation, which works because of its strongly theatrical storytelling sensibility. Leading us through four interviews with prominent religious, activist and journalistic figures conducted earlier this year, Mccann offers a social, political and recent-historical primer on Northern Ireland, from the rise of the Rev Ian Paisley as a powerful public speaker and divisive populist leader whose political strengths aren’t unfamiliar in today’s landscape; to the nausea-inducing violence of the Troubles; and up to and including the DUP’S ongoing resistance to birth control and gay marriage rights.
Former schoolteacher Mccann is a clear and evocative orator and storyteller, and the journey he takes us on is captivating – yet the real power of his play is in its finale. Where it appears initially that the piece may be a work of choir-preaching partisanship, he also questions the “self-righteous sectarianism” of protesters. The DUP’S membership is a broad church, he says, and only by learning to talk to one another may peace and compromise arrive.
DAVID POLLOCK
Until 26 August. Today 1:05pm.