Fringe Dance

Mary Brennan

Smother

Zoo Southside

Four Stars

The Sacrifice of Roaring

Zoo Aviary

Three Stars

Lost in Grey

Dance Base

Two Stars

SMOTHER – choreographed by Andrea Walker and performed, full-on, by 201 Dance Company – was one of the hot tickets on last year’s Fringe. Since then, there have been changes in the seven-strong cast – but switch off those alarm bells: the raw energy levels continue to go off the Richter scale while the storyline about gay lovers has lost none of its original heft.

According to Walker –who’s familiar with the hip hop scene – there’s some way to go before macho B-boys give same sex relationships a break. So there’s an edge of defiance - possibly cheek? - in Walker using a mix of street styles in a choreography that centres on the sexual attraction, and strengthening affection, between not one but two same-sex couples. As individuals, they run with a fast-dancing, fast-living crowd – the puffs of white powder that float around them makes the drug scene a part of that action. Sex, however, is the high that draws two men from a power moves face-off into a rollercoaster liaison where hip hop flows into contemporary dance and back again as passion hits the rocks. Meanwhile, in a sweetly funny contrast to this drama, two flirty girls are falling into bed, and then into a love affair. If, at times, some sequences seem tied to the length of a song lyric, there’s no mistaking the expressive meaning that Walker seeds into a movement vocabulary where we expect the head, not the heart, to go spinning.

Runs until August 27

IF YOU read the programme notes before you see The Sacrifice of Roaring, you will have a fair idea of what the monologue (in Taiwanese dialect) is about - but even so, there is a cultural and religious context to Hsu Chen Wei’s choreography that can only be hinted at in this hand-out. If you choose not to fret about this – simply look, listen and respond with an open mind – then certain sequences, certain aspects of how the dancers move, will connect into something familiar and common to all: profound despair and the dark forces that attend it. The monologue details a totally humiliating day in a young man’s workplace. He comes home, collapses – and there, just as in the monologue, is a young man, sprawled face down on a red carpet, under a red lamp that bathes the space in an unearthly glow. His spirit bruised and wounded, he turns to the gods. Lights several sticks of incense and as the perfumed smoke spirals out towards us, three female forms melt out of the shadows. One, tall and dressed in white, has an aura of purposeful control in her demeanour. Her two followers, however, toddle behind with heads down – whatever rituals of mortality and resurrection ensue, you know they are there like blotting paper, to absorb the stains of misery. And indeed, once a trance-like state is achieved, their bodies take on all the anguishing ills that were killing the young man’s vitality. As they wrench, contort and slam into each other, he seems to revive – sufficiently, at any rate, to pick up an electric guitar and underpin the chantings and gongings with chords of his own. It ends with the woman in white slinging the limp body of an acolyte over her shoulder: the roaring has ended in sacrifice. Strange, compelling, intense – a piece of contemporary Taiwanese choreography driven by ancient mysteries and modern stresses, and shown as part of the Taiwan Season on the Fringe.

Runs until August 29

TO CATCH up with all aspects of the Taiwan Season, you have to venue hop. Resident Island Dance Theatre can be found on the Dance Base programme, with Lost in Grey, a piece where a pleasingly strong group of dancers is ultimately let down by choreography that tries to say too much about issues of mental illness in urban environments. A fragile-looking waif in white drifts by, as if in an isolating bubble. Other bodies wrench, twitch, display signs of inner distress in fidgets and tics. But while it’s possible to admire the technique, the conviction of the dancers it’s harder to feel a sense of involvement with the world – and the pressures of daily life – their performance strives to depict.

Runs until August 28