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Assembly Roxy – Central
AWA’s pioneering multi-media dance performance is a feast for the senses and a bullet straight to your soul. Summary
Rating
Unmissable!
Possibly the only positive thing to come out of the dire times we live in – with no shortage of pandemics, wars and poverty – is the spontaneous return of the arts to absurdism and the deconstruction of meaning; two currents that also emerged almost eighty years ago in the aftermath of World War II.
Following this trail, Luxembourgian dance company AWA (aka Baptiste Hilbert and Catarina Barbosa) merge different artforms to create a unique, multi-sensory performance that is so absorbing as to be almost immersive. Using world class dance, original soundtracks, live camera projections and mesmerising lighting effects, ideas are disassembled and handed to the spectators. We are then compelled to put them back together using our perception, but not without experiencing its intrinsic sense of rupture. The result is engrossing.
The four people visible on stage (plus the butler, who only makes brief appearances) are all wearing sleek 40s costumes. Catarina Barbosaand Georges Maikel are two phenomenal dancers whose initial movements look fragmented, as if individual frames printed on a film. They are followed and filmed by Pedro Barbosa and Catherine Dauphin, two intrepid camera operators whose images are being projected live on a screen over their heads. The two cameras are at times brandished as weapons or pointed against each other out of spite, occasionally obstructed to have the last say or even worshipped.
Picking up the lighting in different ways and presenting different points of view or levels of detail, what’s projected on the back wall isn’t the action happening there and then, but an alternative reality. This leads us to the realisation that the screen only shows what the operator choses to depict, and not the full picture – a thought that echoes with the current screen-dependency affecting society. A striking effect is achieved by superimposing the feeds coming from the two cameras to show two separate angles in the same frame.
The hallucinatory final act is a dance macabre in which Catarina Barbosa looks like a music box dancer that has broken free from her pedestal (in truth, she is a wife escaping the shackles of domestic abuse). An experimental use of music includes dizzying arrangements of Prokofiev’s “Dance of the Knights” and Vivaldi’s aria “Sposa Son Disprezzata” – both having in common an intense use of strings to express the impending despair. This erupts into a nightmarish blood-drenched closing sequence that expands into the auditorium and transports us all into the scene of the crime.
Visiting Edinburgh for the first time, AKA’s kaleidoscopic work is a feast for the senses, acquiring a fourth dimension thanks to its cinematography, a fifth one through music and even a sixth dimension with lighting. It is also a bullet to the soul, as we become embedded into an infectious and excruciating world that makes us question our own sanity.
Created by: Baptiste Hilbert and Catarina Barbosa
Produced by: AWA / Baptiste Hilbert & Catarina Barbosa
Shoot the Cameraman plays at EdFringe 2023 until 28 August, 3pm at Assembly Roxy. Further information and bookings here.
