Five shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe, vol. 7: English special
The Horizon Showcase of work by England-based artists has evolved into the Here & Now Showcase. Here are five exciting productions in its programme.
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a Substack about theatre written by me, Fergus Morgan.
This newsletter is the seventh in a series of issues focusing on the Edinburgh Fringe, which runs throughout August. Most will contain a brief round-up of updates from the festival, plus recommendations for five shows to see. This one is a promo issue on the exciting shows at the festival as part of the Here & Now Showcase. Regular newsletters will resume in September.
There is a couple of things you can do to help me keep this newsletter and its coverage of fringe theatre going. Firstly, you can share it far and wide, forward it to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage them to subscribe. And secondly, you can become a paid supporter of The Crush Bar - it’s £50/year or £5/month - via the button below. Thanks.
The festival has twenty days left…
It all kicked off over the weekend. I’m not going to link to reviews in this top section in general, but you can read my write-up of the Traverse Theatre’s programme here in The Financial Times, and keep up to date with my stuff in The Stage here. I share it all on Twitter/X, too.
There was a power cut on the first official day of the festival, which caused a bit of chaos around Bristo Square and George Square, including the deflation of Underbelly’s big purple cow. Some performances were cancelled, but others continued by candlelight or outside. You can read about it in The Stage here.
Lyn Gardner has written in The Stage about how every show at the festival is extraordinary, given the wider circumstances in which they have been made…
“When I take my seat up to six times a day in fringe venues over the coming days, I will remind myself that every show is a miracle. But theatre should not have to rely on miracles; we need investment.”
Various famous people are floating about. Gerard Butler was refused entry to a show. Eddie Izzard had some Thai food. Liz Truss got heckled. I myself sat a few seats away from Graham Norton at the Traverse, and Andi and Miquita Oliver wandered past the café I was busy scribbling reviews in yesterday.
Susan Mansfield has surveyed the reasons why people still come to the Fringe in The Scotsman - to experiment, to seek out opportunities, to change the world…
“The Fringe has always been a great place to create work but it is now more than ever internationally recognised by investors and promoters as a place that breeds invention and quality.”
The Here & Now Showcase platforms bold work by England-based artists.
There are thirteen official showcases at this year’s Fringe, hailing from Scotland, Canada, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, South Korea, Luxembourg, Quebec, Taiwan, Australia - as you will see in an upcoming issue - and England. These curated, state-sponsored programmes exist as shop-windows for exciting, often experimental work that might not otherwise make it to the festival.
Showcases are useful for international industry professionals, who are invited to see the work in the hope that they might offer it an opportunity to tour abroad. They are handy for regular festival-goers, too, though, as a way of navigating the festival. Not sure what to see? Check out a showcase for a slice of interesting, international work.
From 1997 to 2019, the British Council ran a showcase for UK-based artists and companies. From 2021 until 2023, the Horizon Showcase platformed work by England-based artists. This year, the Horizon Showcase has evolved into the Here & Now Showcase, funded by Arts Council England and produced by Midlands-based dance development organisation FABRIC, Battersea Arts Centre, and Gateshead International Festival Theatre, under the leadership of GIFT director Kate Craddock.
“We asked between 20 and 30 organisations around England to nominate shows and artists for us to consider,” Craddock explains. “From there, we did a selection process with some previous international delegates, and honed in on the work that would really resonate with international programmers and international audiences, while also paying attention to which artists would benefit most from this kind of exposure.”
“What is most important to us is that the work in the showcase is representative of a wide range of lived experiences, and that it speaks to the contemporary moment,” Craddock continues. “When people think of theatre from England, they probably think of a play with actors, directed in a traditional theatre. We are trying to break that. We are trying to show that performance in England is much more than that.”
L’Addition - Summerhall, 11.30am
This 70-minute show sees two legends of experimental theatre collaborate. Bert and Nasi - that is Greek theatremaker Nasi Voutsas and French theatremaker Bertrand Lesca - first arrived at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016 with EUROHOUSE, a playful exploration of European geopolitics, then followed that with a string of similarly silly shows about serious subjects, including Palmyra in 2017 and One and The End in 2019.
Tim Etchells, meanwhile, has been at the forefront of avant-garde theatre for decades, having made dozens of seminal shows with Forced Entertainment, the celebrated, Sheffield-based company he co-founded in 1984. Now, both companies come together for a new show, L’Addition. Directed by Etchells and performed by Bert and Nasi, it involves a simple scene - a customer ordering a drink from a waiter - being repeated over and over and over again, spiralling into some kind of nightmarish farce, and innovatively examining the evolution of power dynamics as it does so.
First performed in French at the Avignon Festival last year, an English-language version of L’Addition now runs at Summerhall from August 13-25, before transferring to London’s Battersea Arts Centre in November. You can read Natasha Tripney’s fascinating interview with Bert and Nasi in her brilliant Substack Cafe Europa here, and you can get tickets to the show via the button below.
TESTO, ZOO Southside, 8.30pm
As a multidisciplinary artist, Wet Mess is known for visceral performances, extravagant costumes and striking face-painting, as witnessed in the short films Sissy Fatigue and A Bodiless Thing. A graduate of Edinburgh College of Art, they co-founded the London and Glasgow-based collective STASIS in 2014, then won a Fringe First in 2018 for dressed, which they co-created with ThisEgg, AKA Josie Dale-Jones.
They have also choreographed a music video for Swedish singer-songwriter Tove Lo, done movement direction for London Grammar and Wolf Alice, and won the Royal Vauxhall Tavern’s Not Another Drag Competition. Last year, they performed in Travis Alabanza and Debbie Hannan’s Sound Of The Underground at the Royal Court.
Now, Wet Mess’ first full-length solo show TESTO arrives at the Edinburgh Fringe. It sees them explore transitions, testosterone and “the use of drag to find, create, and recreate ourselves on stage.” Audiences, Wet Mess told Dance Art Journal, “can expect surreal spectacles, distorted camp, and dyke-y dance routines, mixed with the mundane reality of the stickiness of conversations around non-binary transition.” It runs at ZOO Southside from August 11-25. You can get tickets via the button below.
First Trimester - Dance Base, delegate only event
Krishna Istha is a London-based performance artist, comedian and theatremaker, who has written for Netflix series Sex Education, featured on Netflix special Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda, and previously performed at the Fringe in 2017 with Adrienne Truscott, Ursula Martinez and Zoe Coombs Marr’s controversial Wild Bore.
Now, Istha is back with First Trimester, a remarkable, durational piece of one-on-one performance art that involves Istha conducting ten-minute live interviews with participants, in the hope that one might turn out to be the perfect sperm donor for them and their partner. The show explores human connection and parenthood, redefining what it means to create a family as a transgender person.
The first instalment in a planned trilogy of works, First Trimester has so far seen Krishna interview 198 different people in the UK, New Zealand and Denmark. When it ran at Battersea Arts Centre in November last year, WhatsOnStage’s Frey Kwa Hawking gave it five stars and called it “a considered, funny, clear and direct speed-dating dream.” It arrives at the festival as a special event for delegates of the Here & Now Showcase. You can contact the showcase to attend via the button below.
Distorted Constellations – Dance Base, delegate only event
Visual snow syndrome is a rare neurological condition that causes people to see persistent, flickering dots. Multidisciplinary artist Nwando Ebizie has it, and her experience of it inspired her acclaimed, multimedia work Distorted Constellations.
The piece involves Ebizie using light, sound, projection, music, and more to immerse audiences in a disorienting environment - an “Afrofabulist alternate reality,” in her words - that encourages them to question their senses and appreciate neurodiverse perceptions. Within that world, Ebizie stages experimental performances and rituals.
First created in 2019, Distorted Constellations has already been seen in Melbourne, Singapore, and London. Like First Trimester, it is in Edinburgh as a special event for showcase delegates, but you can contact Here & Now to attend via the button below.
Dandyism - Dance Base, times vary
The Society of Ambience-Makers and Elegant People - or Le Sape - is a culture of stylish dressing in the Congolese capitals of Kinshasa and Brazzaville, which began when local men started appropriating the flamboyant outfits of eighteenth-century French and English colonialists, and which is seen by some as a symbol of resistance.
Rwanda-born, London and Newcastle-based multidisciplinary artist Ziza Patrick’s 2018 dance Dandyism is an outdoor celebration and exploration of this sartorial phenomenon, featuring Ziza, plus dancers Azula Lerato Mncube, Neema Mwande and Jeremiah Olusola. When it was performed as part of the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival in 2021, The Guardian’s Lyndsey Winship called it “a dance of personality, identity, pride and playfulness, with high-stepping footwork, gentlemanly gestures, and a lot of fun and funk. You can get a taste of it on YouTube here.
Like Distorted Constellations and First Trimester, Dandyism is not arriving in Edinburgh in full. It is part of Fringe Fragments, a new pitching platform organised by Dance Base that runs from August 19-20. You can book tickets for that via the button below.
Thanks for reading
That is it for this issue. I will be back in your inboxes on Friday with five more shows to see at the festival. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all, really - just reply to this email or find me on Twitter, where I am @FergusMorgan.
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Fergus