At the Edinburgh festival, watching theatre and dance, it’s fascinating to see in microcosm how close the two forms have become. Dancers speak, actors move; physicality is part of theatre, ideas a key ingredient in dance. Yet they remain distinct.
This is mainly because only a few actors embody thought like dancers. Take Solène Weinachter. The French-born dancer is perhaps best known for her award-winning performance opposite Ben Duke in Juliet and Romeo for Lost Dog. Here, as there, she talks as much as she dances, yet every gesture is imbued with a sense of meaning that an actor would struggle to match.
After All is a light show about the dark subject of funerals. It begins when Weinachter describes, with a writer’s eye for detail, returning to France for the funeral of her uncle Bob, where the family have come unprepared for the rites. When the funeral director pops on My Way, she is asked to dance.
She agrees, partly because “it is the role of the artist to patch a hole in the social fabric” and partly from “a deep desire to prove to my family that I can be useful”. As she mimics her performance, squeezing around an invisible coffin, greeting a late-arriving mother in the aisle, she comes to the realisation that “at my funeral, there is no way My Way will be played”.
It’s all very funny, and delivered by Weinachter with astonishing assurance, her manner warm and inviting, her movement honed and compelling. It leads to an examination of what form her own funeral would take, which in turn touches on childlessness, loneliness and the marks we leave behind.
Towards the close, she dances with abandon, jumping under a spotlight, long hair flying, making sweeping circles and stamps. It’s an affirmation of life that feels at odds with the bleakness of the subject, a spinning crescendo of wonder and vitality. Cannily, this isn’t how she closes the show, but it makes its point.
Dances Like a Bomb also finishes with a section of pure dance, this time to LCD Soundsystem’s catchy Dance Yrself Clean. Finola Cronin, formerly of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, and Mikel Murfi, a physical theatre practitioner who has worked regularly with choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan, gradually let their bodies succumb to its beats before flinging themselves around with an abandon more often seen in teenagers.
This is part of the point. Dances Like a Bomb, made by twin sisters Jessica and Megan Kennedy for the Dublin-based Junk Ensemble, is a celebration and a survey of the act of ageing and where it takes our bodies. It begins, in semi-darkness, with the couple in deliberately unflattering underwear, sitting on chairs at the back of the stage, like a Beckettian double act waiting for death.
There’s more than a touch of Beckett in what unfolds in a series of short scenes. She pulls his flesh, making rolls of the flab around his stomach; he flicks her bat wings, making flying noises. It is at once comic and unkind, a ruthless examination of all the ways bodies betray us. A monologue stresses the repetitive qualities of his daily life, as he prowls the stage, arms swinging, knees loose. She hits him hard with one hand, and then they embark on an uneasy duet, at once affectionate and wary.
They play a game called “Ways of Dying”, miming neglect, disembowelment, immolation, assisted dying, clapping the other’s interpretation. His gestures are big and expansive, hers are more contained and gentle. The relationship between them is one of need; all desire spent, they seem to prop up one another’s bodies, shuffling towards the end, but full of spirit.
In Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring the concluding dance is not one of life but of death, as the Chosen Maiden is forced to dance herself to death for the sake of the tribe. Pina Bausch’s 1975 version of the ballet – which had its UK premiere in 1978 at the Edinburgh Festival – remains one of the most shudderingly horrific depictions, as she makes the dancer push herself beyond exhaustion, her breath seeming to tear her body apart.
A specially recruited company of 34 dancers from 14 African countries has been touring a production for more than two years; seeing it again, it is still thrilling, still intense, as they bring fresh dynamics and feeling to Bausch’s grounded steps. Dovi Afi Anique Ayiboe is electrifying and transfixing in that central role. “Dance, dance, or else we are lost,” said Bausch, who understood a lot about living, dying and dancing.
Star ratings (out of five):
After All ★★★★
Dances Like a Bomb ★★★
The Rite of Spring ★★★★★
