Tradfest, This Is How We Fly, Pleasance Theatre, Edinburgh, Rob Adams, five stars
Nic Gareiss introduced the concept of international quartet This Is How We Fly by saying that the dancer becomes part of the melody and the musicians become part of the dance. He might also have added that all four group members paint with sound and create poetry with word and deed.
Michigan-born Gareiss is the dancer and his relationship with fiddler Caoimhi?n O? Raghallaigh, here playing the ten-string hardanger d'amore, clarinettist Sean Mac Erlaine and Swedish percussionist Petter Berndalen is probably interesting enough when viewed from the auditorium. With the audience seated in the round onstage with the group, this was an experience beyond fascinating.
Part of the attraction is the lightness of touch each of the quartet applies in making traditional tunes and dances – and some more abstract sounds and scenes – come alive. Gareiss makes music with the slightest brush of his heel on his dance board and creates rhythm just by rubbing a dance shoe on a trouser leg. His description of the moves involved in an Acadian dance became a kind of mesmerising rap, only exceeded in its mesmerisation by his carrying out of the steps.
If O? Raghallaigh and Mac Erlaine are the ones who, as well as gentling along the bare bones of a traditional tune, take the music into spontaneously creative zones, then Berndalen is the source of madcap humour while also making brilliantly subtle melodic-rhythmical shapes with one drum stick and the fingertips of his left hand.
Their encore found Mac Erlaine introducing Mongolian throat singing as a drone for the other three’s quiet as a whisper melody and rhythm making, a stunning coda in keeping with the whole performance.
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