A festival as overstuffed with acts as Edinburgh brings on the worst kind of Fomo. You walk past a blur of superlatives and star-ratings on posters and think: where are these amazing shows and why haven’t I seen them? Of the dance and circus shows I sampled throughout the first week, hardly any were knockouts, but there were interesting ideas, visual stunners, some disappointments and a surprise.
Most interesting is a piece that tries talking about Aboriginal land rights through acrobatics. The title of Australian company Na Djinang Circus’s Of the Land on Which We Meet references the ritual of acknowledging the traditional custodians of land where performances take place. This circus trio – comprising one performer of Indigenous heritage, one descended from colonial settlers and one from a family of more recent migrants – are grappling with the meaning of it. They’re also grappling with each other’s bodies: rolling, flipping, stretching, lifting. A woman walks across the landscapes of the other performers’ forms, the rocky terrain of shoulders, knees and elbows. She even balances her whole weight on the flexed toes of another. Indigenous Australian Johnathon Brown is the base – in circus terms, that’s the solid foundation for others to balance on or fly from, and that metaphor lives through the piece.
