The performance starts with twisting shapes, shadowed yet hyper-exposed under multi-angled lighting, that seek to start the audience into a conversation about the body, its place in the physical world and its essential rootlessness. Does the body have a place and a function outside of its ‘sensual nature’, and can we find it in the act of movement? Or- more specifically- dance?

Flesh doesn’t provide simple conclusions to these questions. If anything they become more complicated during the course of the performance. The multiplicity of dreamlike animal shapes suggest the opposite, a sense of being trapped within a frame prone to innumerable changes and full of innumerable frailties. The dancers tangle and come unstuck in a series of increasingly more bizarre, fragmented shapes. One possible reading is bodies thrown for the first time into physical shock, or brought to a point of radical physical change. There’s a real sense of frailty in all the changes and volatile shifts in choreography, a sense that even in the strange, hyper-reality of the performance there is a razor thin line between ultimate expression and catastrophe as in the cacophony of the concluding scene

It shows physical reality and experience as not the ultimate form of being, but a compromised, messy and, crucially, fleeting reality prone to shifts and starts. Flesh shows - but refuses to tell - that movement isn’t everything there is, but is maybe just the fringe. (FG)

Flesh played at Dance Base - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/flesh

Invisible Difference- http://www.invisibledifference.org.uk/

Dance as political movement?- http://jashm.press.illinois.edu/6.3/6-3IsDance_Glasser112-122.pdf

The Power to Provoke- https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2004/jun/05/dance.music