What is it?
The latest outing from avant-garde performance company Panic Lab and choreographer Joseph Mercier is set to be one of the hottest tickets at this year’s Edinburgh festival fringe (7-31 August). The show is about Mercier and his chums fulfilling their lifetime dream of turning into comic-book superheroes and superheroines. There are secret identities, form-fitting spandex costumes, doppelgangers and awesome supervillains. Not to mention fighting. As fake as it’s fierce.
Was the fighting always fake?
No way! Panic Lab were the outfit who gave us The Rite of Spring as a cage fight. Following months of training, Mercier and sidekick Jordan Lennie (pictured above) punched and kicked each other to a bloody, black-eyed standstill, to Stravinsky’s score, on the 100th anniversary of the Rite’s premiere in Paris. So when it comes to over-the-top fantasy combat – to superheroic thwack! and kapow! – they know their stuff.
Do there happen to be hot female supervillains who fight with swords and speak Japanese?
Of course. Mind Games and the Vixen. And it goes without saying that when they kiss, they look at each other and say: “This complicates things.”
So there’s a whole subversive gender thing too?
This is Panic Lab. There’s always a subversive gender thing. What’s more, it looks as if the shapeshifter with the green ring killed Captain Patriot’s mother…
Booking: zoofestival.co.uk
Website: paniclab.co.uk
