Ian Abbott on dance at the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe: Raffle Tickets and Choreographic Bloat

I started writing about dance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2016 and 10 years is like one of those raffle ticket moments. A year that ends in a 5 or a 0 is often deemed noteworthy, prizewinning or even a place to stop. So I decided to mark this anniversary by writing only about companies and artists I had never seen before, and seeing how they would stand up —or stand out — against the dozens of other works I have seen over the last decade at the Fringe. 

Let’s start with the one the audiences loved the most, the one which has the potential to be a commercially successful production with a 10-year lifespan at the Fringe and a West End transfer and the one that has so many possible franchise spinoffs it is almost a licence to print money.

Welcome to ‘I Made You A Mixtape’, the debut show by Response Theatre Company at The Space, which self-describes as: ‘Welcome to the party you always wished you were invited to. Step into the heart of a 90s college dorm hang, complete with live musicians and the greatest hits of the decade. Nine girls arrive for one last night together before their lives change forever. With each track played, we get a new glimpse into their world; through impromptu music videos, deep female friendships, and unfiltered emotion by the bucketload. This isn’t your typical dance show — it changes every night, with the girls’ fates being revealed to them, and you, in real time.’

Over the course of 12 songs in 50 minutes, the audience get to witness and vicariously re-live a fictional joy-filled night in a geographically unspecified girls college dorm. Each of the girls dance a solo to extremely familiar, radio friendly, 90s American soft rock like Blink 182, Meredith Brooke, Greenday and Alanis Morrisette. At the start of each show nine audience members are chosen to provide the emotional intention behind each solo via a handwritten sign — e.g. This is Tatiana and after 2nite…she breaks up with her partner, or she has her visa revoked etc.— and that emotional framing is only revealed to the performer (and the audience) when they hear the start of their track and see the sign.

Response Theatre Company, led by Christie Lee Manning, framed their production (and company) as the first Meisner-based movement theatre practice. I’m not here to go into a Meisner rabbit hole and its relationship to/with improvisation and choreographic attunement, but it’s not as pioneering a practice as the company might have you think. I Made You A Mixtape is 90s nostalgia coded. The girls get out the board game Dream Phone, their costumes are straight out of the Tammy Girl window display and they even bring a willing audience member on stage for a song midway through the show and dress them up with blow up musical instruments, wigs and some average wedding dancing,

But I felt there was something off with the contrivance and forced manifestation of joy. There’s a fine line between a performer trying to feel joy and one whose joy is visceral so that an audience can receive that joy and feel it. It can be any emotion, but joy is what Response Theatre Company is dealing in. For me, the joy pipe is broken; it leaked out somewhere and I didn’t feel that joy because it was artificially manufactured. Suddenly those feelings and emotions purported to be held by the performers felt cynical and my glow stick was waving limply in the final song.

As each solo and the group piece ‘The Routine’ demonstrated, the dancers can dance well. Choreographically, it will be familiar to a generation that grew up on early 2000s YouTube music videos and bedroom choreographies. Within each solo, the Meisner technique is activated and everyone who’s not dancing the solo is “responding” to the emotional framing, but I don’t connect with effortful displays of performance and attention-grabbing that essentially mask what a nuanced and grooved improvisatory or bodily listening practice could do better.

But as it stands, this work isn’t designed for a critical eye and that’s OK. It’s conjured squarely for a Saturday night, nostalgic, light entertainment audience who aren’t paying attention to the unevenness of the cast and who want to listen to some familiar music, sway their head and escape for 50 minutes. On its own terms it’s a rip-roaring success and I can see this becoming an Edinburgh staple like the 360 Allstars or The Black Blues Brothers.

Flipping over the C90 to another debut full-length show is ‘Stop Playing Jacob’s Ladder With My Spine (SPJLWMS)’ by HotCat Collective who were performing in the studio at ZOO Southside. They describe the show as: ‘There are ants in your drawers. There is food in your microwave. There is blood on the food. There are ants in the blood. They are watching you eat. You have a nosebleed.’ Blending absurdist theatre, contemporary dance and creative captioning, HotCat Collective present their new show about loss of control, expectations within domestic settings, and what it means to rot in the face of sterilisation. Four dancers and a microwave invite you to embrace chaos despite the prying eyes. Don’t hide. Come and see the beautiful colours on your mouldy fork.’

I watched this show at the end of a very good day in Edinburgh; I’d been to the Sauna Theatre (more on this later) for the first time to see Bubble Schmeisis (Remixed) by Nick Cassenbaum, was reading Decomposition Book by Sara van Os and had seen a VERY interesting work in progress from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin called Bulk which looked at the male relationship to gym culture, but told through documentary dance theatre using a street dance vocabulary and new electronic music. So HotCat received me in a positive mood and I came out of SPJLWMS even more exalted. I felt like they had created a stage world that captured the sense of emotional rot and sacred isolationism that Gen Z are experiencing; it was the first UK dance company that I’ve seen since the COVID pandemic that delivered an emotional and physical portrait of truth about what it’s like to have lived through these last 6 years as a young adult. 

This world was made up of exquisite poetic writing (spoken and also projected as captioning with some delicious typographical and motion graphic choices by Ted Fussell), an emotionally layered original electronic soundtrack (courtesy of Estuardo del Angel, Eve Boulos, Oli Spooner and Tom Warrilow), a microwave and some disgusting ready meals which left a choreographic residue on the floor as well as on their bodies. What’s interesting is that the choreography isn’t trying to be innovative or radical or outrageous, but it feels known, it matches the domestic and emotional environment that the other parts of the production support. 

One issue I have with the production is that there’s one performer (out of four) who is considerably weaker in technical dance execution and vocal delivery of the text; this almost keeps pulling me out of the world they create and I don’t think a demonstrably weaker performer was an intentional artistic or dramaturgical choice. It’s one of those tricky situations where each member of a collective adds so many ideas, nuances and layers to the creation and end product that the rightness of each person to perform the work is not assessed. But sometimes, for the good of the collective, you need to step back, look at it objectively and see what it is that the production really needs.

I am so excited to see what Hot Cat Collective do next (they’re currently working on ‘Nara’ — a choreographic duet investigating propaganda and the threat to shared queer spaces of safety). As I shared on Insta in the aftermath of the show, nothing in terms of dance had or did excite me more when SPJLWMS came to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2026 and I look forward to rotting with the cats in the future.

Woodhill by LUNG at ZOO Southside self describes as: ‘I dance in the horror of grief. Three men at Woodhill prison are dead. Their families demand answers. This is a call to arms about the crisis facing prisons. Gut-punching choreography and unflinching beats shine a light on the hidden story of HMP Woodhill. Lyrically told in their own words, three families investigate what happened to their boys. What they discover is so haunting, it turns their world upside down. Pushing the form of documentary theatre and dance, Woodhill is an explosive true story by multi-award-winning LUNG and originally developed with The North Wall.’

This is a remount of the original 2023 production,which landed in Edinburgh, garlanded with five stars from The Guardian, before it heads back out on a 20-date tour across England and Wales this autumn. As a piece of theatre, it was the worst thing I saw at this year’s Fringe. I cannot fathom how this production has so many 4-star and 5 Star reviews from legacy media publications. It’s so shiny (look at those nice Ikea bookcases and cardboard boxes), so empty (move some boxes, nothing happens, move some shelves, nothing happens, drop some sand, nothing happens) and so emotionless (what is going on with the acting voiceovers?). This is a work made for funding applications and venue programmers who buy a show on the politics of it without having seen it. 

This is not to deny that what happened to the three men and their families is horrific; the prison system should be abolished and the justice system is riddled with so much injustice. But the direction (by Matt Woodhead) and choreography (by Alexzandra Sarmiento) was so monotonous and so one note. I heard (and agreed with) multiple audience members around me who uttered the dreaded “this is GCSE dance” with the literal bland miming of movements to the verbatim words coming out from the speakers. Nothing in the direction, scenography, choreography, sound design or performance added any value, deepened my emotional connection or told a different part of the story. Woodhill did not need to be made.

International Aufguss Masters by Sauna Sessions Arts Club at the Sauna Theatre self describes as: ‘Experience the world’s greatest Aufguss artists right here in Edinburgh. Stunning choreography and extraordinary storytelling using steam and scent in a beautiful sauna theatre with state-of-the-art lighting and surround sound. Aufguss is a sauna ritual that circulates steam and scent through mesmeric towel waving as part of a story told through words, music, dance, scent and heat. Two different artists perform every day with line-ups announced in advance on sauna theatre socials, featuring world class Aufguss artists from across Europe and around the world. This is theatre to captivate all of your senses.”

The Sauna Theatre is a world first and an experiential wonder. The design of it is a collaboration between studio three sixty and Sauna Sessions Arts Club, a new venture founded by Lucy Osborne and James Grieve. Not only do you get 14 hours of immersive content (from morning raves to Nils Frahm crossovers to late night literary salons) programmed each day for an 80-seater theatre that is also a state-of-the-art sauna with full technical rig, but there are plunge pools, cold showers, changing rooms, lockers, a dry bar and a merch shed to ensure you feel comfortable getting in and out of each 90-minute sauna experience. 

After booking a £25 ticket for Nick Cassenbaum’s performance of Bubble Schmeisis (Remixed), and enjoying the experience of sweating with 16 other people for 60 minutes in my shorts, I thought I’d book in for another session — International Aufguss Masters — as I (with 26 others) was attracted by the hyperbole of “stunning choreography and extraordinary storytelling”. 

I’d never heard of the word Aufguss before August, but it translates roughly as: “a multi-sensory ritual inside the sauna lasting approximately 15 minutes. The Aufguss master works with water and a towel using techniques to circulate heat throughout the sauna.” There are six core elements which combine to create Aufguss:

• Heat
• Ice balls with essential oils
• Towel work
• Lighting/ambience
• Music
• Style

In the introduction to our session, Head of Sauna (what a wonderful title) Deborah Carr introduces Mark from the Czech Republic, who demonstrates a Modern Classic Aufguss, followed by a chance to leave the sauna, plunge, cool off and then come back for the UK Champion Kyle, who  demonstrates Show Aufguss and who will be taking this show to the World Aufguss Championships. 

Imagine a scented five-minute hybrid of the arm and shoulder work from waacking mixed with a pizza dough spinning towel played to a soft rock soundtrack. Towels are twisted, spun and wafted — single and double handed — and when a master is in front of you, you get a face full of fragrantly wafted wind. This is repeated three times over the 15 minutes, using different music and different scents. If I’m being generous I was somewhat underwhelmed by the “stunning choreography”; it was more of a technical demonstration (and maybe that’s what Modern Classic is) and there’s no doubt that Mark has an excellent wafting technique. Whilst I definitely won’t be going to the world championships, I was intrigued to find out at what level the UK is and what “extraordinary storytelling” is presented. Kyle attempted to tell a Hurricane Katerina story, chatting to his mother (recorded on the soundtrack) about preparing for the storm, battening down the hatches and waiting for the aftermath. There were cans of Bud Light, cheap props and a hand-written sign stuck to the sound booth which drooped half-way through the performance. If Woodhill was GCSE dance, then Kyle wasn’t even passing his GCSE drama exam. It was horrific in narrative, production quality and towel wafting technique. Literally anyone, on any other stage in Edinburgh, could have crafted a better 15-minute experience than Kyle with less than an hour’s notice.

If we’re in the early days of a better (theatre) nation with Sauna Theatre (the tipping point of Aufguss only really came about during COVID when a lot of people online began to share their towel tricks) it will take some time for artists to understand the specific demands and possibilities of Sauna Theatre and how it could genuinely work as a crafted theatrical experience, rather than a hot room with an under-qualified man making terribly inefficient attempts at wafting and acting.

There were a number of performances with pole dancers at the Fringe this year, so I went to see two of them – Poles by Corpo Maquina at Assembly @ Dance Base and DUSK/NIGHT/DAWN by VERTICAL DREAMSCAPE at Assembly Roxy.

Poles self describes as: ‘A performance by Corpo Máquina’s artistic director Guilherme Miotto for pole dance virtuoso Yvonne Smink. With a live soundscape from musician/composer Isaac Poels. Pole dancer Yvonne Smink won the Dutch pole dancing championships multiple times and is a rising star internationally. In Poles, Guilherme highlights Yvonne’s impressive technical strength and allows for joy to radiate from her no-nonsense appearance. With her down-to-earth approach and healthy blush, Yvonne makes her way through the steel pipe construction. At the cutting edge of personal and public space, she delivers chilling moments of physicality and intimacy.’

I agree with this part of the description only: ‘Yvonne makes her way through the steel pipe construction’ and that’s all that really happens for the duration of the show. It’s a technical demonstration of her strength, tricks, endurance and improvisatory skills on this particular spider-like scaffold apparatus. After booking the ticket in advance, I got a notice a few days before the performance which said: “Since you bought your tickets, the producers of the show have changed the show’s duration. The show duration was 60 minutes, the show duration is now 45 minutes. We don’t have any further information about why the duration has changed.” This wasn’t acknowledged by the venue, or the artist or in the programme and to lose a quarter of the advertised length (or not make it in the first place) is concerning and I’m unsure what Miotto did as an artistic director. Maybe he chose the luscious, blue reflective marley floor which I loved; when I was zoning out, it was actually more interesting to watch the upside down reflection of Smink duetting with herself above and below the floor line.

The other part which was concerning was the relationship between Poels and Smink; I was watching Poels throughout and he barely looked up from his modular synthesiser throughout the show and didn’t have any sort of connection; he was just composing his music in complete isolation. There was no need for him to be a live presence on the stage. It would have been more sonically interesting to just hear the grip and friction sounds from Smink as she slides, grabs and holds onto the scaffold with different parts of her body.

DUSK/NIGHT/DAWN self describes as: ‘An experimental aerial pole dance explosion performed by NYC collective VERTICAL DREAMSCAPE, featuring US Pole Art Champion Donna Carnow and interdisciplinary artist Gina Alm. DUSK/NIGHT/DAWN follows a pole-dancer through a night of work as her craft and identity dissolve into a montage of cinematic and sensual, dark yet dazzling dream worlds. This high-octane, durational work pushes the performers’ bodies and minds to the limit, producing a powerful, visceral and transcendent product that feels vibrant, textured, unpredictable, and of an alien world.” 

The technical skill and bodily contortions of Carnow are sensational; she is pushing at the edges and expectations of what a body can do whilst upside down, in the air, and lightly connected via a single limb, hand or knee crease to the flying pole. What she does sits somewhere between circus, gymnastics, tricking and dance and I agree with this part: “dissolve into a montage of cinematic and sensual, dark yet dazzling dream worlds.” DUSK/NIGHT/DAWN is a six-scene montage in search of a narrative; it’s predictable, in as much as we know that each scene will start with a light prop/concept (red balloons, ink etc.) and end up with either Carrow or Alm — or both — backlit on the pole doing moves so fast that it’s hard to appreciate the craft it takes to transition from one pose to the other and hold it. 

I am not someone who appreciates mere technical exhibition and DUSK/NIGHT/DAWN and Poles attempt to bring something else to the table, in terms of dramaturgy or narrative, but it’s so weak that it needs to be re-framed to ensure it doesn’t speak in such wanky and alienating marketing hyperbole as: “a powerful, visceral and transcendent product that feels vibrant, textured, unpredictable, and of an alien world”, or “At the cutting edge of personal and public space, she delivers chilling moments of physicality and intimacy.”

Good Enough? By HIMHERANDIT was part of #DANISH in the Main Hall at Summerhall and this is how they self-describe: ‘From the critically acclaimed, award-winning company behind Mass Effect and Champions comes a brand-new performance celebrating imperfection, queer joy and the courage to find your tribe. Good Enough? is a queer, quirky and boisterous physical theatre performance about reclaiming your story and having the courage to be loud, awkward and unapologetically yourself. This is not a show about perfect bodies or polished dancers. It’s about the instinct to move, to express and to be seen — especially when language isn’t enough.”

This is an ode to Paola Drera, one of the three performers in Good Enough? She is the one dancer at the Fringe this year that has that magnetic performance sauce, the kind that you know after watching her for less than a minute, where you just can’t stop watching that one performer amongst the wider cast; it’s not because the other cast members are bad, but she is undeniably good. Good Enough? is sat somewhere between a historical confessional about the personal inadequacies of the three performers and a competitive audition for our (audience) attention and validation. Directed by Andreas Constantino, it’s a neatly constructed, emotionally manipulative (in a good way) and well-paced work where the audience cannot not root for the performers who share childhood photographs, the best and worst bits of themselves and why this trio — as a chosen family — is so important to them.

Drera has the holy trinity of: emotional truth, stage presence and technical delivery. I believed what she was saying and her body authentically matched her words, and the grooved craft required to know how to connect with an audience so we feel safe was nestled right to her wonderful technical foundation. Paola Drera: you are good enough.

There’s a whole set of other dance work that I saw including: Ham Sandwiches and Discipline by NAF Dance, Bigger by Compagnie CHAABANE, Jerk Off! By Nadia P Manzoor, Exit by Circumstances and Proximities by LEI Dance Theatre which are part of the Edinburgh bloat — an ever-expanding average middle and conceptually beige programme that offers perfectly serviceable but instantly forgettable dance work. This is the reality of what’s happening in a festival which broke records with a total of 4,202 registered shows across nearly 300 venues. 

Bigger does not equal better, so after 21 shows this year and over 150 across the decade, consider this a pause to my writing about dance at the Fringe in Edinburgh; it’s no longer relevant and I don’t want to spend my time amongst the choreographic bloat.

Ian Abbott at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Part 1

Show Me Your Nationalisms: Ian Abbott at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Part 1

At the beginning of the final week of the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Creative Scotland (the national public body that supports the arts, screen and creative industries across the country and distributes funding from the Scottish Government and The National Lottery) issued the following statement:

“Creative Scotland has taken the difficult decision to close the Open Fund for Individuals to new applications due to the Scottish Government being unable to confirm release of £6.6m in Grant-in-Aid budget in the current financial year, 2024-25. The Fund will close to new applications from 2pm on Friday 30th August 2024. Creative Scotland planned to apply £3m of the £6.6m budget to support the Open Fund for Individuals in 2024-25, alongside £3m of National Lottery income.”

The Cabinet Secretary for Constitution, External Affairs and Culture, Angus Robertson MSP, who is responsible for cultural funding in Scotland via the Scottish Government, also wrote — in a ‘chef’s kiss’ moment of choreographic synchronicity — the introductory welcome to the nationalistic Scottish showcase Made in Scotland 2024: “Welcome to Made in Scotland 2024! Celebrating a wonderful collection of Scottish dance, theatre and music, Made in Scotland — supported by the Scottish Government’s Festivals Expo Fund — gives Scottish artists the opportunity to showcase their work to the international artistic community, gathered each year in our city for the greatest celebration of arts and culture on the planet.”

So on one hand we have the munificent Angus Robertson telling us how he supports Scottish artists and companies to bring their work to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, to share and allow them to explore the international opportunities that arise from performing at the world’s largest arts festival, and at the same time and place we have the very same politician decimating the only open fund that individual artists can apply to by reneging on his “gold-plated” promise made in October 2023 to restore the £6.6million worth of Creative Scotland reserves.

In light of this aforementioned context, this Part 1 will be a response to some of the Made in Scotland work I saw alongside other international work which didn’t have a nationalistic frame or the support of their respective country, whilst a subsequent Part 2 text will examine work exclusively from some of the other inter/nationalist showcases, where financially-supported artists bring their work to Edinburgh as representatives of their respective countries and kiss the flag.

The first to clutch the saltire between their double denimed teeth is Common Is As Common Does: A Memoir (CIACDAM) by 21 Common at ZOO Southside. CIACDAM is my gold-plated, fringe smash, best-in-show and top pick by a country mile. If you imagine Goat Island swallowing the Tarantino filmography, then heading out to a line dance class before finishing off in a working-class karaoke booth before ripping off their wife beaters and kicking the shite out of their girlfriends, this is something close to what we saw.

Premiering at Johnstone Town Hall in March 2023, the directors Lucy Gaizely and Gary Gardiner (with Dan Brown) said: “We wanted to create a memoir based on lived experience that speaks to a large audience. How do you create a joyful, mesmerising and exciting show that looks so deeply at trauma and life’s bullshit?”

Presented over seven scenes and narrated exclusively by The Man (Gary Gardiner), the work encourages us to think about the relational aesthetics of cowboy culture, family dynamics and working-class white male violence. I loved seeing a multi-generational community cast — aka The Mob — on stage alongside the professional cast. The Mob are the ones who create the atmosphere, doss about happily on the sofa in their double denim and stetsons and deliver a number of satisfying line dance set pieces.

CIACDAM takes as its starting point the impact and lack of agency poverty affords young men and how exposure to violence shapes ideas of masculinity. When you get this hyper-realistic tension of yee-hawing bar room brawling and bottle-smashing blood bouts and “books are for fucks” call-outs, it comes startlingly close to some of my own experiences as a teenager. As the fringe (and the wider performing arts industry) becomes increasingly difficult and even more expensive for artists to attend and be part of, then the already minimal amount of working-class representation will only get scarcer.

CIACDAM is not an easy watch and asks questions about how we and the system normalise violence. Some of the middle-class people I spoke to about it didn’t like its rough edges or out-of-tune karaoke singing, but for me it’s my perfect theatrical Venn diagram and as Gabi Cepelyte says: “Same as you, I am looking for idols. Like you, I find it easier to believe I can become someone, when people who look like me win.”

The Last Forecast (TLF), by Bridie Gane and Catherine Wheels at Assembly @ Dance Base, is an exquisitely crafted production for ages 6+ (and costume designer Alison Brown and designer Alisa Kalyanova appear to have strong and (unattributed?) influences from Thandiwe Muriu’s Camp photography series). TLF tells the story of Gael (performed by the wondrous and expressive Shanelle Clemenson) — a gecko-like creature who lives alone, in harmony with their surroundings, where everything matches and everything is perfect. That is until a stranger (Kieran Brown) arrives, laden with earthly belongings and starts setting up home, disturbing this island sanctuary.

TLF is a masterclass in how to craft and execute beautiful, lightly political, wordless and world-class dance for young people. Set in a highly-patterned, 70s psychedelic bothy somewhere on an unnamed Scottish island, we see Gael trying to come to terms with the incursion of the stranger and playing an unwitting game of camouflage, hide and seek and trying not to be discovered — with the perfect amount of slapstick, repetition and pure dance technique.

There are some witty alternative shipping radio forecasts which subtly prophesy the incoming rising waters and the impact it would have on their bothy, forcing the two characters to work together to bring all their furniture to a higher point, build a friendship and wait for the storm to pass. The warmth and connection between Brown and Clemenson is remarkable, especially considering that Clemenson was brought in and learnt the show in 8 days before their fringe run.

TLF is the latest in a long line of incredibly strong Scottish works for young audiences that have toured the world in the last 20 years, so if it doesn’t get booked at least 30 times outside Scotland in the next three years, then the theatrical touring landscape really is in its end-of-days scenario.

So that’s 2/2, but is all work in the Made in Scotland showcase uniformly brilliant? No. At this point I’d like to introduce the commercially successful, but choreographically redundant double bill — The Flock and Moving Cloud — by Scottish Dance Theatre (SDT) at ZOO Southside.

SDT describe their sell-out two week run as setting “the stage on fire with two of their most physically daring and dynamic works in an unforgettable evening of dance by two of the most exciting female choreographers in the European dance scene: Roser López Espinosa and Sofia Nappi.”

After a promising opening V-shape of The Flock by Espinosa full of synchronous wing flapping, flat backing, tiny little jumps and oodles of repetition I stopped counting the sloppy, technical mistakes and poor execution from the dancers after the tenth one. Add to this to the nearly 30 minutes of painfully manufactured running in dull patterned shapes (dancers cannot do fake running on stage) and awkward lift work (SDT are really not known for their lift work), it feels like the dancer execution, choice of choreographer and rehearsal direction are the weakest I’ve seen from SDT in the last ten years.

Moving Cloud, which has live Scottish folk music performed by TRIP, is a glorified #VisitScotland infomercial, and whilst the dancers execute this work better (I repeat, they really do not like being off the floor), you’re suddenly aware that this “flagship” company of Scotland, especially in the context of the fringe and the dozens of other dance companies performing, isn’t as technically good as a pack of Hip Hop and contemporary dancers from Berlin or the second-best dance show from the Taiwan Season.

At the fringe, broadly speaking, there’s comedy, art and entertainment on offer and with this double-bill it feels like SDT have squarely pitched their dancing tent in the entertainment field leaving behind their pioneering choreographic roots which would have been previously firmly pegged in the art field. If this is how they want to be known to their audiences, as creators of commercially viable and instantly forgettable staged entertainment that evaporates from our lives as soon as we’ve left the theatre then The Flock and Moving Cloud are an absolute success and their marketing team are the gold standard. However, if they continue along this path then they will continue to be no longer artistically relevant to the choreographic conversation in Scotland.

Stepping away from Mr Robertson and nationalistic frames for a moment, there were three other works (Ananta, The Eternal by Ragamala Dance Company from the USA, Dance N’Speak Easy by Wanted Posse from France and N.Ormes by Agathe and Adrien from Canada) which are also worth talking about.

Aparna Ramaswamy’s Ananta, The Eternal at Assembly @ Dance Base is a programme of four shorter classical bharatanatyam works (two duets from the Ramaswamy sisters Aparna and Ashwini and two solos) to pre-recorded music and it marks the occasion when the sisters have “come together for their first duet evening.” The promotional material includes the following: “Aparna Ramaswamy preserves ancient dance forms with stunning virtuosity and expressiveness to create a living tradition that is resonant for modern times” (Boston Globe). “Award-winning choreographer Aparna Ramaswamy weaves together threads of body, memory, desire and devotion to describe the eternal relationship between the deity and the devotee.”

The work “was created with special commissioning funds from The Mayer Family and commissioning support from Asia Society Texas” and whilst there’s no doubt that Aparna is an excellent technician and charismatic performer with some sweet and powerful jaatis across the three works she performs in, there is a gap in technique and expressiveness levels between the sisters in the duets. Ashwini is noticeably weaker, especially across her shoulder line, and when the duets demand a mirrored precision it unfortunately draws the focus away from Aparna.

There is an introductory, pre-recorded voice intro to three of the four pieces. We hear how in the first piece the deity/devotee relationship manifests as: “Krishna, He is the Infinite and the Intimate. He saved the Yamuna River and its people from the snake-demon, Kaliya, dancing the snake into submission.” In the third work — choreographed and taught by Smt. Alarmel Valli — the deity/devotee relationship talks of: “Shiva Nataraja symbolizes the rhythms of the cosmos. His dance is the pulse of the universe, and He represents both the destruction of illusion and the creation of enlightenment.”

With so little bharatanatyam on UK stages, the understanding from audiences about this classical form is very shallow and consequently you get audience quotes on the fringe festival website like: “While I’m sure it is part of the cultural background, I found the ankle bells really quite jarring by the end; I was very ready to stop hearing them.” and “Beautiful dancing set to lovely traditional music. Would recommend this show. I haven’t seen dancing like this in person before so was educational to see.”

In the UK there’s been a 25+ year discussion around the framing of bharatanatyam as an ancient, traditional 2000+ year-old form; what some contemporary UK bharatanatyam performers and choreographers are attempting to do is educate audiences that this mythologising is false and it harms this classical form; yet this language is still perpetuated by some artists, venues and media outlets who want to keep bharatanatyam in a little, colourful, exotic box.

I would love to see at a future Edinburgh Festival Fringe or at the Edinburgh International Festival a collaboration between a suite of classical Indian artists and companies from the UK and abroad to reframe and present what these forms are really like in 2025, what they can achieve, and have an opportunity to talk about what artists think these forms could be in the future.

Continuing on the false mythologising train is the leery and misogynistic abomination that is Dance N’Speak Easy by Wanted Posse at McEwan Hall, Underbelly, which sells itself as: “Join world champions of hip-hop in an electrifying alternate universe where charleston footsteps and jitterbug beats meet freestyle hip-hop in a 1920s New York speakeasy. Infused with dazzling dance routines and thrilling burlesque to the remixed sounds of Miles Davis, James Brown and Jessica Rabbit, this is an afternoon of high-energy entertainment fit for the whole family.”

Whilst this represents the debut of Wanted Posse at the Edinburgh Fringe, the same performance was at the Avignon Festival in 2018 and the combination of prohibition, Hip Hop dance and the speakeasy is one that has been mined multiple times by the England-based Southpaw Dance Company since 2013. Southpaw premiered an outdoor work called Faust in 2013 (“In this re-imagining of Goethe’s Faust, drinking, gambling, womanising, and general debauchery make the Speakeasy a perfect place for a man to lose his soul”) before going on to develop an indoor version called Speakeasy in 2019/20 before touring the UK in Autumn 2023: “The professional cast includes some of the UK’s finest Bboys who combine the vocabulary of breaking and contemporary seamlessly alongside Charleston, Lindy and other swing styles of the roaring 20’s.”

How Dance N’Speak Easy is framed as fit for the whole family is beyond me; with five male dancers constantly drooling, pawing and vying for the attention of the one female dancer (played by Jessie Perot) across multiple scenes via their breaking power moves, there’s a silhouette scene where Perot looks as if she is disrobing and we see only her outline in a cheap burlesque imitation. Dance N’Speak Easy is devoid of any atmosphere and I dream of at least 2D characterisation or a narrative arc; instead it’s made up of breaking buffoonery and a desire for dopamine theatre — show me a move, do the splits, perform faux drunkenness — which sees the audience seal clapping lightly every minute or so to respond to an unsatisfying and mediocre trick.

Choreographer Njagui Hagbé said: “In 2013, we were selected for the final of France’s Got Talent and presented Prohibition. The reception was so enthusiastic that we decided to create a whole show based on the same idea: the forbidden. Dance N’Speak Easy is a theatrical choreographic project, based on the themes of otherness and freedom, as seen through the eyes of the Prohibition years. We wanted to go back to these troubled years and draw parallels between the prohibitions of that period and our current situation. Our demand is clear: we want to defend our right to dance.”

In some respects, understanding the origin of the work (a TV talent show where you are working in 5-10 second segments to keep the audience and judges’ attention) offers an insight into how their decisions have come to fruition. But when you’re fitting the scene length to pre-existing music tracks, concepts are often spread too thin or not given enough time to develop and tableau, freeze frame and slow-motion theatrical techniques are as dated and as bad as their attempts at group choreography.

There’s no doubt that the level of breaking ability is incredibly high — there’s about 12 really innovative transitions, threads, lifts and power moves across the 60-minute show which are jaw dropping — but the dramaturgical naivety means that they appear out of nowhere with no set up and then disappear without a trace. The final ‘drunk battle’ between two dancers who are each holding one of the empty liquor bottles that feature heavily in the set is a highlight, as the complexity of executing a 1990 or a complex freeze with a bottle in hand is genuinely tough to pull off. Whilst this is firmly pegging itself in the entertainment field and not as a work of art, the representation of women is appalling and Dance N’Speak Easy adds another layer to the deeply problematic and grooved Hip Hop dance narratives of misogyny that continue to plague the Hip Hop theatre world.

Talking of dramaturgical naivety and a work devoid of atmosphere, it’s time to return to Made in Scotland and Guesthouse Projects’ performance of The Show For Young Men at Assembly @ Dance Base which is framed as: “A man and a boy meet on a stage that’s somewhere between a building site, a junkyard, and a hillside at dawn. Together they dance, play, wrestle, and sing trying to make sense of what it means to be a man. The Show For Young Men is a tender and moving new contemporary dance piece made for audiences aged 8+, co-created and performed by Alfie, a 10-year-old boy, and Robbie Synge, a 40-something-year-old male dancer.”

The further I get from this show the more I dislike it because of its sense of manufactured play. Eoin McKenzie (as Lead Artist and Director) has invited a bunch of other adults into a room who have together created a production that speaks to a much-discussed and funder cat-nipped concept. There were a lot of shows exploring the crises of masculinity at Tony Mills’ first full length fringe programme at Dance Base, and whilst there’s buckets of care in ensuring the safety of Alfie, everything is muted, artificial and feels dead behind the eyes. The junkyard tubes are shiny and new, the constant ex-footballer radio commentary is a cheap attempt at the semiotics of manhood, there’s not a scratch or piece of dirt on their costumes or their hands and the contact and lift work are calm and measured. Children don’t exist in this manufactured state of play; if a child was on a building site they’d be near feral, demanding, loud and wanting to climb up things over and over again, little beings full of emotion and giddy at the prospect of an unexplored playground. Whereas The Show For Young Men is actually a display of emotional regulation (at one point Synge suddenly started getting angry and banging the set which felt needlessly awkward and required Alfie to give him some biscuits to calm him down) and rewards both performers for not showing their real feelings. The Show For Young Men exists in a world which actively celebrates the repression of both expressive physicality and emotional variation of young and not-so-young men.

The final work to be Made in Scotland was Futuristic Folktales by Charlotte Mclean & Collaborators running for six performances in week two at Assembly @ Dance Base. This is how the work markets itself: “a dance for hope, reimagines the creation story through the tale of the first ever womb. It’s a place that unites everyone, we were all born from a womb. Using storytelling, contemporary and Scottish Highland dance, this experimental dance theatre production questions the preservation of tradition, myth, and identity whilst scrutinising body politics and reproductive injustice.”

With an extraordinarily distorted pipes soundtrack from Malin Lewis, a kilted Mclean opens the performance in a friendly and low-key way that offers a live contextual introduction about her desire to say ‘womb’ a lot, some thoughts about identity and reproductive rights, Scottish highland dancing, the 30 collaborators involved in making the show (including a witch and a b-boy) and her previous 5-star hit show. I really like this as a way of opening the show; it’s totally disarming and makes it clear what she wants the frame to be before introducing the two performer/collaborators, Seke Chimutengwende and Orrow Bell.

There’s a delicious Made in Scotland showcase meta narrative running alongside Futuristic Folktakes with Mclean talking about wombs (a place where things are made) in Scotland. The soundtrack from Lewis sets the emotional landscape which Chimutengwende and Bell inhabit and it’s a sonic environment that you definitely won’t hear on the Royal Mile. Lewis is an instrument maker as well as a composer and they’ve invented a new two-octave bagpipe that melds West coast traditions with a melodious discordant sound which cleanses and lifts the ears.

In a work that is as full of text as movement, Chimutengwende and Bell offer us a lightness in their presence and speak of “hypersonic wombs, womb patriarchy, womb empires, womb complexity” and dozens of other womb states. They begin to deconstruct the patterns of step dancing and the arm and hand positioning, almost absurding it into a glitch state. Sat alongside this is a repeated visual representation of the act of birthing through legs, arms and fingers as well as sometimes trying to crawl back inside to see how physically impossible that act might be.

Futuristic Folktales examines many of the tropes of Scottishness (pipes, kilts, highland dancing), looks them straight in the eyes and queers them with a gentle and joyous aplomb. I am totally here for it and believe entirely in the world that has been created.

And now the final work that was not made in Scotland, N.Ormes by Agathe and Adrien, who were back at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the second consecutive year after achieving a certain level of critical and commercial success in 2023. This is how they describe themselves: “Provocative, dysfunctional and tender, N.Ormes is an award-winning circus show that pushes the limits of gender norms with never-before-seen acrobatic exchanges. Don’t miss its Fringe comeback! Skilfully combining acrobatics and dance, we follow our two protagonists and their relationship, navigating between complicity and power struggles. Come witness this inspiring journey to see how the exchange of roles and acrobatics blurs our preconceptions!”

Agathe and Adrien examine their bodies and notice they have the same diameter across many parts, including their calves, chest, biceps etc. and decide to invert some circus gender norms. N.Ormes is a really well-executed show that has a strong foundational concept and shares some new (to me) balances and acrobatics. There’s often the assumption that in circus shows it’s the man who is the base and the lifter, whereas in N.Ormes it’s not the case; it’s more like “anything you can do, I can do too.” What was refreshing to see was Adrien in a state of almost numb refusal, laying on the floor, emotionally vacant and resisting the urge from Agathe to fulfil his expected role of virtuosic physicality.

Their foot-bum-seat, springy-knees pike flip was a crowd pleaser, but for me the physical highlight of the show was a hugely effective, illusionary three-legged waltz where it looked as if they were hovering over the floor whilst circling together around the edge of the stage.

I could have done without the emotionally fey soundtrack from Simon Leoza which felt like AI had munched its way through the Mumford and Sons discography and spat out a sonically generic something which doesn’t support the quality of the performers’ execution or the strength of their concept. However, it is a well-loved show, returning for a second year without the support of a nationalistic showcase and for that it should be applauded.

So, Mr Robertson, what’s it going to be? How can a Made in Scotland showcase exist if the individual artists “who get the opportunity to showcase their work to the international artistic community, gathered each year in our city for the greatest celebration of arts and culture on the planet” do not have access to a highly competitive funding pot which enables them to develop their skills and build pioneering productions that represent Scotland on the international stage? How about a new showcase in 2025 called “No Longer Made in Scotland Due To The Political Dick-Swinging Chicken Antics Between Creative Scotland And Angus Robertson.”

*STOP PRESS*

Since filing this text, Mr Robertson has undertaken another sweet dime stop. On September 4th he announced “a review of Creative Scotland to ensure its operations and structure are optimal to the needs of the culture sector…the review, which will be the first since the public body’s establishment in 2010, will examine Creative Scotland’s remit and functions as a funding body, and how the overall impact of planned increases in levels of public funding can be maximised to support sustainability in the sector and in participation in the arts. The Culture Secretary also confirmed that following a period of necessary due diligence, Creative Scotland had now received funding previously allocated to it in the 2024/25 Scottish budget, including £1.8 million for youth music, and £6.6 million that will allow its Open Fund to be re-opened.”

Please, Mr Robertson, I’ve heard enough of your macho-posturing nationalisms. Perhaps you could reflect on the chaos that you and your government have created. The panic from your initial announcement meant that by the time the fund closed on Friday 30 August, Creative Scotland received an additional 819 applications totalling £11.9 million in requested funding. Creative Scotland have since announced that the Open Fund for Individuals will reopen for applications on Tuesday 8 October 2024. The story continues…