A sunny festival Saturday at IDFB

May 14, 2016
David Mead

Those who have been to IDFB’s outdoor shows over the years, especially the evening spectaculars, will know how often the weather seems to be chilly and wet. On the second Tuesday of this year’s festival, it looked like the weather curse had struck again. After days of sunshine, down came the temperature and down came the rain. Fortunately things picked up again. By the time Saturday came round, blue skies had returned and big audiences were able to enjoy the free shows in Centenary Square.

Best of these was Motionhouse’s Torque, a very enjoyable work involving a couple of big earth moving diggers and four dancers. As the machines duet with each other (the drivers did an amazing job keeping everything smooth and near-perfectly synchronised), Junior Cunningham, Alasdair Stewart, Martina Bussi and Rebecca Williams do some impressive and scary things in and hanging off the diggers’ buckets. It’s part gymnastics, part circus acrobatics, part dance, but all great stuff to which the new city library formed an impressive backdrop.

ZoieLogic Dance Theatre in RIDEPhoto Dani Bower
ZoieLogic Dance Theatre in RIDE
Photo Dani Bower

It’s smaller scale made it harder to see, but ZoieLogic Dance Theatre’s RIDE is an equally entertaining 20 minutes in which everything takes place in an around an adapted old Ford Orion. There more than a hint of circus here too as Andy Gardiner, Jamie Higgins and Nathan Johnston use the options to the full as they flip off every surface, dance headlong into through every window and door (and even the bonnet) and more. At one point things get decidedly hairy as the car is levered to a 45 degree angle using a couple of poles. “He’ll fix it in a minute,” says one as another piece of bodywork comes off. And they do, although I don’t think they’ll be working on my car! Good fun, though.

As its title implies, Corey Baker’s Phone Box does indeed take place in, on and around a traditional red telephone kiosk. There’s a lot of miming and clowning. Ben Jones is an appealing performer, but while the humour clearly appealed to many of the younger members of the audience, who giggled along at his antics, they fell flat with me. A section involving a duet with a hoodie (neatly balanced on a selfie stick) is rather clever, but much of the rest of dance left me equally cool. I couldn’t help but compare Phone Box to Aracaladanza’s Vuelos, seen earlier in the week at the Rep, another family-friendly piece specifically aimed at the younger audience, but one that had so much depth and interest for everyone else too.

Phone Box. Photo Dani Bower
Phone Box
Photo Dani Bower

Also outdoors was IDFB’s evening headline event, The Machine Show. While it attracted the crowds, it lacked the wow factor, not even coming close was not even close to the big Victoria Square spectaculars to which regular IDFB-goers have become accustomed. Unless you were there early, there was also a problem seeing everything that was going on. I gave up.

Better things, much better things, were happening indoors. Across Broad Street from Centenary Squares sits the imposing former Municipal Bank Building, which this year was transformed into a Festival Hub, a welcome innovation. Part café, part meeting place, it also housed Cosmic Birds, an exhibition of ingenious kinetic sculptures by former KARAS dancer Shun Ito. In the former main banking hall, all polished marble walls, Cells, an Ito installation of slowly rotating, circular rings within rings was the location for In a Landscape by Kei Miyata, who co-founded KARAS with Saburo Teshigawara.

“Thrift is happiness” it says in big gold letters along the top of one of the walls; an exhortation to former bank clients not to ask for credit or get into debt. “Saving is the mother of riches” is another. How times change. That first statement could also apply to choreography. How often do we see choreographers try to do too much? There was certainly thrift in In a Landscape, and if happiness is a work that’s intense, engaging and well thought out, Miyata’s piece had it in spades.

In A Landscape by Kei MiyataPhoto Robert Day 3
In A Landscape by Kei Miyata
Photo Robert Day

A near-meditative piece, the work’s yoga and martial arts influences were clear. The 13-strong cast of mostly local non-professionals showed remarkable intensity right from an opening that saw them walk slowly but purposefully striking singing bowls, whose chimes resonated gorgeously in the vast space. When five dancers plus Miyata at the centre reached their positions, they rocked gently like pendulums or clappers, their movement slowly awakening different parts of their bodies. The smooth, slow, yet purposeful dance juxtaposed wonderfully with the strident drumming now coming from the live musicians of Liverpool based group Ex Easter Island Head (of whom I would like to hear more) in the back corner. The dancers, and indeed the sounds, were not so much in the landscape as part of the landscape.

Later there was much circular movement reflecting the ever-circling mobiles above. Another section was heavily martial arts influenced, the movement here more direct and forceful. When they leave, Miyata and the others returned, their shadows playing on the walls.

Some of the transitions could have been smoother, and I was unconvinced of the need for the final moments that saw the dancers repeatedly sitting up and laying down, but overall it was impressive indeed. Remarkably, Miyata told me afterwards that she had only had six rehearsals with the dancers, and only three of those also involved the musicians. It just shows what can be done. Most festivals throw up unexpected pleasures, surprise finds, and this was IDFB’s.

VerTeDance in CorrectionPhoto courtesy VerTeDance
VerTeDance in Correction
Photo courtesy VerTeDance

Saturday 14th also saw Hofesh Shechter’s Political Mother at the Rep, and VerTeDance in Correction at the Patrick Centre. Correction is a wonderfully innovative piece that considers the idea that we are all tied by who and what we are, and while much of time we could break free, we either choose not to do so or are pressured by society into not doing so. The seven dancers may not be able to move their feet (their shoes are glued solidly to the floor) but Correction is jammed with inventive and sometimes humorous dance (including one great scene with a banana). It slowly builds from metronomic swaying side to side that’s reminiscent of a Newton’s cradle to leaning at increasingly crazy angles and falling and recovering. Fabulous live music too courtesy of the Clarinet Factory.

It was a very good day, one when IDFB actually felt like a festival. Seeing several shows in the space of a few hours almost made it feel like being at Edinburgh. But things could have been managed a bit better. The festival does sometimes need to get its communications together. Changes to the schedule in Centenary Square didn’t appear to be on the main website (although I understand they were posted in a blog). The audience for Correction was very small, and yet, while the day’s Centenary Square events were heavily promoted there, I didn’t hear a single mention that VerTeDance were performing (or come to that of later IDFB programmes). Correction is admittedly not an easy sell, but if you don’t try… And if you did get to the Hippodrome you would be forgiven for thinking you had the wrong day. A private gala was on and the front door was manned by burly security guards (actually they were quite friendly if you spoke to them, but first appearances and all that). There was no hint that the show was on, or come to that, that IDFB was happening at all. No signs and no volunteers pointing you to the Thorp Street corporate entrance, where you had to go. If you made it that far, buying tickets took an age, thanks partly to a broken printer meaning they were being handwritten (of course, they couldn’t possibly speed things up by not asking for names, addresses and so on). Thankfully, the performance made up for it.