Edinburgh Fringe dance and physical theatre reviews: IV | Puff

IV ★★★

Dance Base (Venue 22) until 24 August

You know a dance work is doing something right, when your emotional response ranges from hate to love.

The opening moments of this new work by London-based artist and dancer SERAFINE1369 are a slow torture for those in need of stimulation. A voiceover announces the time, one of four dancers move, then we all sit and wait for the next announcement (roughly one-two minutes later), so they can move again.

IV | SERAFINE1369

This realisation almost makes it worse (at least when you’re blissfully unaware, you live in hope of activity), but gradually things start to change. Short bursts of action become more prolonged, and the pockets of improvisation carried out by these very watchable dancers never fails to engage.

At one point, the whole room takes on a clubbing vibe, with fast beats, a stage full of haze, and the kind of 2am dance floor movement that’s all-consuming (for them, and us).

As an exploration of the relationship between dancer and choreographer, who’s in charge of when and how a body moves, and how an audience responds to that, IV is fascinating. But the chunks of inactivity, excessive haze, and dialogue that isn’t always fully audible, places a barrier between viewer and performer that limits our response.

Kelly Apter

Puff ★★★

Dance Base (Venue 22) until 24 August

When we first meet Brazilian performer Hiltinho Fantástico, he bounces onto the stage with an enviable loose-limbed breeziness. Dressed in baggy shorts, with gold paint in his hair, he inhabits a range of dance styles (passinho, African, samba, capoeira), fusing them together with a special quality all his own.

Forty five minutes later, he is a changed man. Drenched in sweat, a line of gold picks out the discs in his spine, and his mouth, neck and chest are covered in metallic silver paint. The paint’s arrival is a mystery (the gold, presumably, dripping from his hair - but the silver is anyone’s guess) and is in curious contrast to the show’s title ('puff' in Portuguese means when something magically disappears).

Choreographer Alice Ripoll was inspired by the way disguise is used in dances of the African diaspora, and she has coaxed some entrancing moves out of this magnetic performer.

But regardless of how engaging Fantástico is, 45 minutes with one person on stage and just two minutes of music can feel a little hard-going. Ripoll obviously had her reasons for choosing silence over sound, but in the drive to widen the accessibility of dance, it’s a questionable move.

Kelly Apter

Make sure you keep up to date with Arts and Culture news from across Scotland by signing up to our free newsletter here.