This is the second production inspired by Frida Kahlo that I’ve seen this summer. The first, The Four Fridas, was an enormous spectacle put together by Greenwich & Docklands International Festival’s Bradley Hemmings. It included a mesmerising and moving flight of the Voladores. Caroline Bowditch’s piece is the opposite in scale – intimate and friendly – but equally resonant, exploring the marks we leave on the world we exist in.

Bowditch has fallen head over heels for Frida. Or is it that she’s fallen head over heels for the idea of Frida? Or that Frida’s life and work resonate with her so much that she has fallen in love with the story of Frida? Over sixty minutes she charmingly chats to us about her life and how her discovery of Kahlo’s work and biography has inspired this performance – and continues to inspire her life. Kahlo was severely injured in a bus accident as a young woman, including a broken spinal cord that rendered her immobile for three months. We meet Bowditch lying on a bright yellow table listening to the music Frida played at home. She is joined on stage by two beguiling dancers, dressed in signature bright Kahlo colours. The three women dance together and alone, conjuring images of confidence and courage to isolation and nerves. The movement is fluid and with clean lines and soft shapes. It is performed with rich emotion.

We fall in love with Caroline, Frida’s story fading into the distance as she charismatically regales us with hilarious anecdotes and touching love stories. We hear about her attending a conference for little people at which she hooks up with a ‘tall’ woman and has a fantastically rich love affair. We are given shots of tequila and collectively down them. She receives a voicemail from an old teacher who has seen her on the news – utterly astounded by Caroline’s achievements in this world.

The entire piece is full of heart and soul. It’s the word ‘love’ in the title that carries the idea of our legacy from the top of the show and onto the evening street. On our way out we’re handed postcards and urged to send them to someone we love. Surely that’s how we will be remembered – the loves in our lives and the people we touch. I’m glad to have been touched, very gently, by Caroline Bowditch.

Vertical Influences presents a pair of contemporary dance pieces set on ice. The first piece, Influences, places the audience in a typical configuration, in the side seats above the ice rink. We watch the width of the rink where five dancers/skaters explore notions of groups and loneliness. There are soft and striking passages, though the composition stays firmly inside of what I would anticipate in an ice skating show. We see double axels, spins, sharp cuts and patterns, and several sequences of movement around the ice in a pack. There is something quite ordinary about this first half that without its counterpart would be enjoyable and forgettable, but it sets the stage perfectly for the main event.

After our retreat back into the ice rink café for a 20-minute break, where we sip on hot chocolate and tea, eat crisps and candy, we return to the rink, only this time we are led onto the ice. We sit at the end, peering into the shadowy depth of the rink in front of us. This half, called Vertical, is what elevates the evening to something joyous and haunting that will not easily leave my memory. The skaters dive into the notion of glide – which allows them to remain still while moving. Their capacity to generate speed and drift, gliding sometimes at significant speeds without visible bodily movement, builds a series of images, only achievable in this medium, that cut sharply into my visual memory. The skaters glide directly at the audience, stopping only at the last moment, almost leaping at us from the distance. They explore eerily shape-shifting vignettes of glide-inspired choreography that evolve into a striking composition that I hope is the beginning of a much larger body of work not only by Le Patin Libre, but other companies who may follow. Days later these vignettes continue to replay in my mind. Even after viewing dozens of shows these movements hold a sharp staying as they bend physics and reorder our senses. I still see them emerging from the distance. I feel my breath drawing in with excitement, my eyes blurring momentarily and clearing up again, and the lights cut leaving only the echo of shaved ice.

Three bright white slabs hover above a pitch black floor – isolated, yet full of potential. Fred Meller’s stark design beautifully compliments Stef Smith’s new play Swallow, which follows three women as they fiercely navigate a moment in their lives when they feel utterly alone. A slim door that rotates is the only other set piece onstage. It fills with bright white light that flickers to orange to blue to green. This door seems to embody the blood running through our protagonists’ veins. And it keeps them away from each other– a perfect metaphor for Smith’s heartbreaking tale of these women on the verge of forever keeping the door locked.

Rebecca’s husband has abandoned her for another woman, leaving her devastated; Sam is struggling to look in the mirror and accept that she needs to live life as a man; Anna has locked herself in her flat and is violently tearing it apart – the pain of life has overwhelmed her once too many times.

With echoes of Sarah Kane’s work, Smith presents three monologues that seamlessly join together for intimate exchanges between the three women as their lives become interconnected. It’s not the most striking of set-ups, but Smith’s writing fizzes with wit and human insight. I truly cared for these women.

Orla O’Loughlin directs her compelling cast with precision and drive. Her production cleverly strips anything unnecessary away – O’Loughlin focuses us on Anna, Rebecca and Sam, and the immediacy of their experiences captivates. All three performances are alternately touching, insightful, and hilarious. The play is about humanity and the ability for life to completely overwhelm us. We see ourselves in these characters – we see our wives, sisters, friends, colleagues – and the tremendous pain that goes hand in hand with human exchange and connection. Anna, Rebecca, and Sam are all at a point where the pain is so vivid that barricading yourself in a room, smashing your phone and any other form of communication seems the only answer. Is it just too painful to even begin form another relationship? Swallow urges us to understand these moments of extreme despair, hold out a hand and make that leap to carry on.

I sat outside on a cool evening in a quiet back corner of Summerhall chatting with Ellie Dubois, the creator and director of Ringside. It was the time on my ticket, but they were running about five minutes behind, so Ellie kindly asked if that was all right. We chatted about how hot the venues get on these summer days when the crowds are big and the ventilation isn’t designed to sustain so many bodies for so many hours a day. But this performance would be different. It would be only me.

Ellie excused herself to check on things, then invited me in. She led me through the Dissection Room, and into a large back storage space that was cleared out with nothing but a beam of light that I was instructed to stand behind and a trapeze hanging in the middle of the room.

I stood as instructed, then a woman, Cory Johnson, walked in and stood next to me. Very close. She was made up like a 40s pin-up girl. She smiled a little. She looked at me, and then took my hand. I felt the chalk from her hand brush the white powder off on mine. She led me to the trapeze. We looked at the trapeze together, then she took a few steps back. I looked up. I wanted to leap and take hold of it, but restrained myself for fear of breaking apart the careful sequence of events Johnson was carrying out. But I wanted to leap.

She exchanged places with me, so she stood under the trapeze. After some time, she leapt and grasped the bar. Then she performed for me. She looked at me often. I felt very tall somehow, and wanted to join. But again, holding the idea of a passive role that was written for me, I stood still and witnessed. Ringside blurs this notion of passivity, offering temptations that perhaps other audience members respond to differently, or perhaps we are predictable, and the show follows the same sequence each time. Johnson took her time, moved her fingers deliberately on the ropes, and when she finished her routine she walked out of the room.

I was left standing alone. Chalk on my hands.

As I walked out a man stood at the exit. What had felt personal and sincere suddenly became layered and possibly dangerous. Was I seen as a customer who might get out of hand by taking the show up on one of its temptations? Had the performance been a kind of seduction that narrowly managed its limits? Or was it simply the last performance of the night and he was coming in to close up? In the context of the show it was difficult to tell one possibility apart from the other. Ringside’s many shades of closeness left me in a hazy curiosity. In a festival filled with wild and crazy and exhausting, Ringside pushes the world aside for a few breathtaking moments.

The Edinburgh Fringe run is sold out. If Ringside is programmed elsewhere, I suggest you purchase tickets as quickly as possible.

Smoke and Mirrors presents simple, poetic, political acrobatic dance.

The two dancers, Cohdi Harrell and Laura Stokes, use acrobatic structures as vehicles for a subtle kind of poetry that feels more like a dream than a circus. Working in solo and duet, they lead us from the day-to-day grind of business and politics, beneath several layers until they are entirely bare. Piece by piece they lay open the poetry of politics – a done up business of showmanship that hides our nakedness, our humanness, and our poetic limbs.

Highlighted by a duo ropes section that brings circus arts into the realm of literature through its graceful reaching toward a sense that speaks more to prose than circus, I sat happily stunned for the better part of an hour. Smoke and Mirrors, which was a last-minute replacement at Assembly Checkpoint after a show had to pull out due to injury, has blissfully emerged as one of the must-see circus performances in Edinburgh this August.

The setting is as bare as the dancers’ bodies as they weave more complex, layered images than many of the much more highly produced spectacles on hand this month. This acrobatic dance duo from northern New Mexico in the United States offers an extraordinary glimmer of courage that is both unique and needed.