Will these two dancers find any common ground? She’s slight and tentative, he’s buff, inked and smiley. They step forward to introduce themselves in the soft strawberry light but things soon become fractious. Part of the Edinburgh international festival’s “refuge” strand, celebrating artists’ trans-global journeys, We Are Monchichi is a sweet, if repetitive and sometimes thin, piece about reaching an understanding.
Designed for young audiences, the show admirably doesn’t condescend to them. Choreographers Honji Wang and Sébastien Ramirez build on the cast’s own stories. Shihya Peng is Taiwanese (not, she insists crossly, Chinese) and now lives in Paris; Marco di Nardo is Neapolitan (not, he insists crossly, Italian) and now lives in Berlin. Between them they speak loads of languages and can’t manage a friendly conversation in any of them.
They bicker about everything – how to pronounce hamburger, how a penguin isn’t a duck. Gold fairy lights occasionally twinkle on the stage’s bare, twiggy tree (designed by Ida Raven), as if urging them to lighten up.
They also speak different dance languages: her contemporary style is delicately serpentine (she looks sharp in silhouette), while he breaks out limber hip-hop slides and spins. They’re lovely dancers, yet lifts fall into a twisting collapse; a massage uses bum-pummelling fists. They can’t even comfortably put an arm around each other’s shoulders.
The title comes from Peng’s story about her Parisian neighbour, who ignores her name but instead gives her a little toy monkey, saying it looks like her and calling her Monchichi. Like many of the cultural misunderstandings here, it more than skirts racism – there’s a peevish sequence in which the dancers trade needling stereotypes about smothering Italian mamas and pasta (“They stole our noodles,” Peng protests) or dogs on the menu in China.
There’s an animated duet in which they happily toss around a ball of light – until Peng abruptly pops it into her mouth and chews. Whenever you feel the pair are moving on, they relapse into squabble, and this ceaseless wrangling becomes a tiring pattern. Only belatedly does their movement mesh. Even so, they can’t agree how to exit after the curtain call.
We Are Monchichi is at the Studio, Edinburgh, until 21 August.
