On the overcrowded platform of the fringe, any dance event has to take its chances but, still, the publicity supplied for Korean company EDx2 feels unusually inadequate. Most shows at least give audiences a programme sheet. Here there’s a flyer so basic it not only fails to credit the dancers and choreographers but even omits the titles of the two works they present.
An internet search reveals that the opening piece is, in fact, Modern Feeling, choreographed by EDx2’s founder Lee Insoo.
It is a duet that traces a relationship through its stresses and strains, its mismatched impulses towards intimacy. Lee and Kyum Ahem start out in chairs, facing away from each other. But as the two men declare their mutual interest in a tentative language of glance and touch, their gestures build with a vivid, natural fluency into fully danced duets.
Lee is a choreographer of immense ingenuity, who can tease a kaleidoscope of physical permutations from a single idea. He creates a quicksilver puzzle out of partnerwork, where the two men’s arms remain tightly linked; explores the language of yearning and rejection embodied in a lift, the dynamic possibilities of embattled kicks and feints. As virtuosic as his dance invention is, however, it never loses touch with the drama of the men’s inner world.
This finely achieved balance isn’t matched by the second work, What We’ve Lost. Here six dancers spin, leap, grab and cluster in their collective attempt to possess the invisible object of the title, yet while the work delivers plenty of upbeat, witty manoeuvres it doesn’t make convincing sense of its own implied metaphor. Nonetheless, EDx2 put on a genuinely engaging show, and for this their promoter and their venue should be giving them a much bigger shout.
- At Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, until 31 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.
