FOUR STARS

Diversity, innovation, expertise. The opening day of Unlimited impressed on all fronts. Yes, aspects of disability were often the starting point for choreographies - Unlimited is, after all, a festival celebrating the work of artists with disability - but there’s an outward looking perspective that sees particular experiences carry a more universal meaning and relevance.

Perception is the pivotal factor in The Way You Look (at me) Tonight, the generously open, frank duet devised and performed by Claire Cunningham and Jess Curtis, where their episodes of movement, self-aware reflections and pertinent (sometimes impertinent) exchanges about physicality are sparked by filmed contributions from philosopher Alva Noe. With the audience sitting all around them, the pair negotiate pathways through these close-quarter onlookers while mapping out gritty truths about how identity, sexuality and social ‘presence’ alter when disability becomes the apparently defining factor. It unstitches you even more when they make it funny. Cunningham has evolved an idiosyncratic movement technique where her crutches partner her in brinkmanship spins, balances and swift, nimble transits - none of which Curtis can match when he takes up crutches himself. It ends, exquisitely, with them dancing ‘cheek to cheek’ - Cunningham perched atop one crutch, her eyes now on a level with Curtis’s gaze, and their tender togetherness an affirmation of looking beyond appearances and seeing another person for who they really are.

Gary Gardiner and Ian Johnston showed us how they could strut some uber-cool stuff in their previous hit show, Dancer. Now they push personal challenges further in 43 Percent, using scientific data and their own personalities - plus some droll video input from family members - to question how we assess some-one’s physical and mental capabilities. It’s cheeky, yet ready to grapple with darker issues that touch on the meaning of life, but what informs everything is the rapport between Gardiner and Johnston. Nothing can dampen that energy - not even the water that adds to the 57% already in their bodies!

Hiraeth - it means homesickness, in Welsh - saw NCA.Small Theatre (Armenia) condense all the yearning for a lost heartland into a choreography where little rugs became a talismanic reminder of the past, even wrapping round bodies like a comfort blanket of memories. Only founded in 2014, and Armenia’s first ever integrated dance company, the group brought a dignity and spirituality to images from their country’s history that nonetheless speak to us all.