Traverse
Theatre, Edinburgh
Four
stars
Here
they come, some thirty-odd performers sashaying their way through the glitzy
curtain that frames the stage, or else waking up in the middle of what might
well be an even crazier dream that brings them out into the open to go wild. Bringing
together the criss-crossing panache of three theatre companies - Curious Seed, Lung Ha and Lyra – this movement-based
extravaganza is a cradle to grave romp through life’s everyday jungle that
unleashes a living menagerie of delight.
At
the back of the stage, live artist Yvonne Buskie makes a mini mural of
wise-eyed owls on Karen Tennent’s set that leaves enough space for everyone to
play with choreographed abandon. And play they do, as, accompanied by David
Paul Jones and Kevin Lennon’s joyous live piano and guitar score and bathed in
Simon Wilkinson’s shimmering lights, bodies in rest and motion proceed to jump,
dance, sing and throw shapes in various permutations for dear unadulterated life.
As
overseen by Christine Devaney of Curious Seed, Maria Oller of Lung Ha and Lyra’s
Jo Timmins, the result is a physical riot of desires made flesh in a transformative
fashion that looks like Buskie’s paintings have come to life in a tumble of attitude
and élan. With Lung Ha’s regular ensemble augmented by three dancers and seven of
Lyra’s eight-to-ten-year-old ‘Delight Collectors’, such a mesh of generational experience
creates an all-embracing and genuinely radical aesthetic.
Pulsed
along by Jones and Lennon, each little vignette evolves into a glorious
evocation of a life-cycle’s highs and lows, with a near Beckettian determination
to go on no matter what. It is the small things that count here, the barely-there
everyday epiphanies we all share rather than grand gestures. As the sheer
ordinariness of the former are writ large, they become something transcendent in
a show which itself is a matter of life and death as magic moments take flight.
The Herald, April 1st 2019
ends
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