Fringe Dance & Physical Theatre

8 Songs

Assembly Roxy

*****

What The Moon Saw

Zoo Southside

****

Mary Brennan

GOOD, good vibrations - with the audience picking up excitations as the six-strong company, all members of Gandini Juggling, respond to the Beach Boys’ harmonies with witty visual patternings of their own.

Volleys of little white balls - soaring and bopping along with the vocals - are just the beginning. In the course of 8 Songs, the team will ally their astutely co-ordinated juggling skills to hip shimmies, dancey footwork - even balletic leaps - when Dylan insists I Want You or the The Rolling Stones invoke Sympathy for the Devil.

Inbetweentimes, individuals voice the lyrics in a quirky variety of styles - Chris Patfield orates the Stones’ track as if it were Shakespeare, other texts benefit from a humorously deadpan approach. The ensemble’s response to Bowie’s Scary Monsters is a tour-de-force of complex ball-passing, cod-spooky mime and tongue-in-cheek boogie-ings. If these were your Desert Island Discs, you’d want the Gandinis, juggling, as your castaway luxury.

Urban cool? Insights into masculinity and identity? 2Faced Dance have previously nailed that. The charmingly whimsical What the Moon Saw is their first children’s show.

Young Jack (Sam Buswell) can’t get to sleep. But darkness seems to make everything in his bedroom look monochrome. He wants the colour to come back, so the Man in the Moon - aerial artist Sean Moss, inside an overhead hoop - spins up a fantastical midnight adventure where dance and circus skills are intrinsic to the story-telling.

There’s an engaging, larky energy to Buswell’s Jack the lad, while Louis Parker-Evans (in various eccentric guises) matches him across an exhilarating range of movement styles. The metal-work set takes the action off-the-floor (and off-the-wall) - by the end, the ‘house’ outline is all lit up and delighted tinies are on-stage doing colouring in.