Visiting Assembly’s Checkpoint venue always brings back fond memories and summons ghosts, as it was in this space that the legendary Forest Fringe was based for very many years. It is therefore always a delight to see the space used imaginatively, as it is here for this highly physical and visual Russian ensemble production, featuring recent graduates of the renowned Moscow Theatre Arts School. And it feels special and an interesting resonance that the piece I’m seeing here is called Forest!

I take my seat in the front row (there are two front rows, forming a kind of L-shape around the performance space, with both the stage and the floor in between used). In front of me is a mound of earth and some sort of large vessel, covered. To my left, a young man in a white robe is standing, holding a tall stave. A young woman is crouched down, by a sawn log that is standing up vertically in the space. In fact, there are very many young people dotted around the space, on the stage and in the auditorium, all clad in white robes. Lots of the logs too! At the back of the stage is a circular screen, a kind of glowing disc on which monochrome images of rippling water are projected.

The following 55 minutes bring us a beautifully enacted, ritualistic performance piece that is word-free, other than for the lyrics of the haunting songs (sung live, by the ensemble of fourteen, seven men and seven women) that accompany the physical action. And what a pleasure it is to see such a large ensemble at the Fringe! I have virtually no Russian, but I pick out one word that I understand – Nec. Forest.

Forest, inspired by the ‘New Russia’ philosophy of writer Vladimir Bibikhin, takes us on an elemental journey, honouring the five elements of the ancient world – earth, fire, wood, metal and water. We encounter these elements both literally and metaphorically: the smell of the earth and the stripped wood is tangible, the water splashed on faces real. Meanwhile, on screen, we take a bird’s eye view, then an earthworm’s view, of the primeval forest.

The show, devoid of any polemic, honours the natural world, and reflects on humankind’s relationship to it. Forest, unlike some other work at this year’s Fringe, is not here to preach about environmental concerns. It instead honours and praises the power of Mother Nature, and lets us form our own views on how we should relate to the earth.

One particularly strong scene sees timbers falling on screen, as one ensemble member after another climbs onto one of the tall, stripped logs and falls, straight-backed, into the arms of their companions – forward for the men, backward for the women (the ensemble is often divided in its actions by gender, which is a comment not a criticism). The message is clear, and doesn’t need to be spelled out: There are no divisions – we are the trees, and the trees are us.

The interaction between live and onscreen image is excellent, here and in other scenes. The ensemble are a skilled bunch, who work in male-female pairs, in gender-divided groups, or as a whole ensemble taking on archetypal ideas, exploring balance, conflict, birth and death. Scenes have names such as ‘Play – Intimacy’ and ‘Magic – Incantation’. We most definitely feel that we have been taken back to the very beginnings of theatre – we are witnessing (or taking part in) in an animistic ritual, honouring the earth and the spirits that inhabit and draw everything together.

The video work (by Kirill Pleshkevich) is excellent, mostly dreamily realistic with a touch of the surreal, reminding me sometimes of scenes of the natural world in Tarkovsky’s films; and the sound design (by Niyaz Karim) is of the highest quality. From my position in the auditorium, I can’t tell if the soundscape (beyond the live vocal and percussive work of the ensemble) is being created and mixed live or is pre-recorded – but either way, it is an exciting combination of Foley sound, pre-found sounds, and composition which uses guitar alongside less familiar instruments such as the kalimba. Direction and stage design is by Dmitry Melkin, who comes with a reputation for creating site-responsive devised work across Europe,  and here has led his young ensemble into creating a series of strong, sculptural visual images, making enchanting sounds, and enacting physical movement motifs that explore archetypal human experience.

If you want a point of reference, Forest – in its blend of beautiful polyphonic singing and strong physical ensemble work – reminds me a little of Polish company Song of the Goat. The director, in his notes, talks of moving back to a fundamental theatre, and this is indeed what we have here – a theatre that is truly embodied, miles away from the intellectual, conceptual and abstraction of much contemporary theatre.

As we enter the large Upper Hall at Summerhall, we see a man sitting on a perspex cube in the centre of the performance space. At the rear is an enormous screen, and on the screen a succession of names in a large black font on white. Extraordinary names. Snow Trout. Tajikistan Open Fingered Gecko. Bigmouth Rocksnail. The man is making small gestures in response to the names. The snail is pretty easy (antennae!), but some are more challenging – Mediterranean Pillow Coral, for example. There’s a gentle soundscape of bird and insect sounds, rustling leaves, flowing water. We learn that these names are from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature ‘red list’ of extinct or soon to be extinct species, currently at 26,000 species but that is deemed a vast underestimate as it only includes known and tracked species.

He’s up and about now, moving around the space, the small gestures becoming grander movements. The names go by, picking up speed, and he responds. He sweeps his arms around him, he runs, he hops, he spins. Now the soundtrack has changed to something more chaotic, the natural sounds mixed with the roar of cars, the sound of breaking glass, a scream: ‘What’s happening?’

What’s happening is that we’re facing the sixth mass extinction phase in planet earth’s history.

Now we hear the sound of storms, a horror-film touch with a discordant organ, jet planes, static/white noise, TV or radio programme audio clips, a male comedian complaining about people who worry about ‘fucking pandas’. The voice of Greta Thunberg rings out loud and clear above the cacophony.

Now the cube is tipped out, pieces of wood and bone clattering out over the stage floor, which now looks like a post-apocalyptic shoreline scattered with the remains of those who no longer exist – perhaps that includes us! The name Shore Plover flashes up. Then, Penitent Mussel. The man becomes the Penitent Mussel, surveying the debris with abject melancholy…

Vigil is created and performed by Tom Bailey, and presented by Mechanimal. Although it is a solo piece, it is the result of a collaboration,  with the eight-strong creation team including movement direction and dramaturgy by Philippa Hambly, and additional direction/dramaturgy by Guy Jones. The excellent sound composition is by Andrew Cooke, with projections by Limbic Cinema.  Zoologists at UCL are also credited in its making.

All elements of the piece are well thought through, with an excellent relationship between form and content. To honour and embody the species we are losing is a lovely idea – the gentle humour of impersonating snails, frogs and birds adds to the poignancy rather than detracting from the seriousness of the situation in which we find ourselves. It’s a piece in which the scenography is at the heart of the work; and Tom Bailey’s performance is solid, holding the space alone on stage comfortably for an hour.

Of course, there is no happy ending – how could there be – but the ending we get (like the rest of the piece) is beautifully realised and thought provoking.

Vigil is presented by Rose Bruford at Summerhall as part of the Open Minds Open Doors programme.

In 1977, the Golden Record was launched on the Voyager probe – together with instructions for any aliens who come across it on how to play a disc. It’s amusing to think that just 40 years later, our Millennial generation of Earthlings would struggle to cope with such archaic technology – and would perhaps find the images of cheery sportsmen, and the sound of Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Goode puzzling!

Thaddeus Phillips is known to Ed Fringe audiences for 17 Border Crossings, which gave us a cleverly staged mix of autobiography and social commentary as its protagonist took us on a thrilling journey across the world’s most challenging passport controls and frontiers. Inflatable Space (created by Phillips and Tatiana Mallarino) is very different in form and content, but is similarly a clever piece that takes true life stories as its starting point. This time, the journey takes us beyond the boundaries of this earth, out through our solar system and way beyond…

We start with an empty stage, house lights on. A man comes in, pops something down at the back, and while the ‘something’ inflates into an enormous doughnut shaped structure, we listen in to a series of phone calls – to CERN, to NASA, to a company called JPL who are apparently in charge of tracking the Voyager probe. Our Voyager-obsessed protagonist manages to get a meeting with the probe’s caretaker, a Mr Stephens, and by an odd co-incidence, this meeting happens the day after contact with the Voyager is lost – what was a very faint signal is now no signal at all…

We whizz back and forth in space and time (although aware that time is not a river, and all times exist simultaneously, so of course we can time travel). The great big doughnut is sometimes the probe; and sometimes the ‘habitats’ that would have been used had we got round to colonising the moon (inflatables being easier to cart through space than building bricks!). There again, it becomes a space station, or the moon. Or, as a little illuminated model Voyager on a stick glides over it, and past it off into the auditorium, it becomes Jupiter (1979), Saturn (1980), Uranus (1986), Neptune (1989). We learn that by 2017 it will – or has, depending where you are on the timeline, if we’re allowed a timeline for just a moment – pass or have passed into interstellar space. And from there? It’ll just go on and on forever. There is nothing to corrupt or destroy it. It will, in theory, outlive all of us. Outlive humanity. Outlive earth. There’s a fantastic thought. Johnny B Goode and Mozart’s Magic Flute out there forever and ever, long after the human race has ceased to exist (even if locked into a format no one can unlock).

This is just one of many fascinating scientific facts that emerge throughout the piece. Here’s another one: there’s more computer power on that thing in your pocket than they had on Voyager. And no, he’s not talking about your smartphone, he’s talking about your key fob.

What a delightful piece of work this is! It is a highly visual piece with not one but two giant inflatable structures, the lovely little Voyager model on a stick, projections onto the surface of the main inflatable, and great live physical interaction with the structures. The science is delivered with a light hand, mostly through conversations between the two men (Thaddeus Phillips and Ean Sheehy).

I left feeling full of wonder – and a little less frightened of Stephen Hawking’s inflation theory.

Thaddeus Phillips: Inflatable Space is presented in association with Aurora Nova 

‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution!’ It could be the cry of a rebellious daughter, but here it’s the embattled mother who utters anarchist-activist Emma Goldman’s famous words. Her daughter is more inclined towards quoting extreme body artist Orlan…

Everything I See I Swallow is one of a number of good circus-theatre shows seen at this year’s Ed Fringe which investigate family relationships – amongst other themes. The show, written and performed by Tamsin Shasha and Maisy Taylor, and directed by Helen Tennison, presents a fictional story in which an unnamed middle-aged art curator (or at least, a character only referred to as ‘mum’), played by Tamsin Shasha, discovers that her daughter Olivia (Maisy Taylor) has acquired over 50,000 Instagram followers by posting semi-nude images of herself.

So, let the battle commence: the feminist who chained herself to railings at Greenham Common to make a political point is outraged that her daughter would choose to tie herself up in Shibari rope-bondage knots just to make an erotic spectacle of herself. The daughter who has spent a lifetime feeling oppressed by her prettiness has found liberation in bondage: ‘I’m not just an object. I’ve made a choice. To be here. To be tied. And not to deny my sexuality.’

It’s the staging of a battle that has been running for at least forty years – with artists such as the porn-defending sex-working performance artist Annie Sprinkle at the forefront of a movement to justify a woman’s right to choose to present herself any way she wishes, and to do what she likes with her body (be it for the sake of art, commerce or sexual pleasure) on one side of the battle lines; and Andrea Dworkin, and a whole army of radical feminists, on the other side, seeing all porn as at best pandering to the patriarchy and at worst a form of violent assault on women’s bodies. The show has an extra auto-fictional element in that Maisy Taylor is indeed an aficionado of the erotic art of Shibari. (She has written for Total Theatre about this, and her work as an exotic dancer within strip clubs and cabarets, in an article entitled ‘My Body, My Self’.) 

The mother-daughter battle is played out through the manipulation of ropes of all scales, from the slim red Shibari ties to two great thick corde lisse (one black, one white) hanging from the ceiling, above a mirrored floor. The ropes are metaphor, and the ropes are the physical medium through which the battle of ideas and exploration of moral dilemmas is played out. Both women are very able aerialists, the solos and duets are thrilling, and the circus work and Shibari tying is well integrated with other elements of the piece. 

Then, there are monologues offered to the audience, and the highly charged dialogue between the two women that is often an excuse for the firing off of volleys of quotes from classic and new feminist texts. The names of feminist writers and heroines flash up on the back wall: from Mary Wollstonecraft to Naomi Wolf; Beauvoir to Beyonce. There are some sections where the writing feels a little ’uncooked’, and the piece would benefit from further reworking to ease out some of the niggles – but this is a minor criticism. The overwhelming sense is of a piece of work brimming with ideas, brought to us with vim and vigour by two highly skilled performers, who cope very well with the delivery of text even when swinging and hanging and tying each other in knots, literally and metaphorically!

An intelligent investigation of the multi-dimensional nature of contemporary feminism; and of the different pressures and concerns facing women of different ages in the 21st century. And although there is no trite resolution in the piece, there is the message that if we just try to listen to and understand each other, we can get through life… There’s room for both M&S and S&M in this world.

Fringe favourites Ockham’s Razor (winners of a Total Theatre Award with Tipping Point) are back at the beautiful St Stephen’s Church with new show This Time. And what a joy it is! It’s a very different piece to their earlier work. For a start, there’s a fair amount of text – spoken live, and pre-recorded – which is interweaved skilfully with the physical work on floor and equipment.

The ensemble of four comprises company founders/co-directors Alex Harvey and Charlotte Mooney alongside 13-year-old Faith Fahey and 60-year-old Lee Carter. Together, they present an intelligent, sensitive and heartwarming exploration of cross-generational relationships. Stories told verbally include Alex’s trip to Canada with a beloved grandpa (once a daredevil who gave him permission to be wild, now battling dementia); Charlotte’s brutally honest depiction of the daily battles with her headstrong toddler; and Lee’s experience of becoming pregnant unexpectedly at the age of 49. The spoken stories might be mostly of struggle, but the physical stories – enacted on a thrilling range of unusual and specially designed swinging and shape-shifting aerial equipment – is of love and support, counterbalancing the concerns expressed verbally.

So many beautiful moments: Two performers of different ages gaze into each other’s eyes through an empty frame, becoming each other’s mirror, beaming them forward and backward in time. Each person’s uniqueness as an individual is acknowledged along with the relationship between them – in some cases, presented as someone speaking to their younger self. In another wonderful scene, the four performers climb around and through each other and over the equipment, ending up spooned together in what seems to be a treetop family bed. There’s a gorgeous aerial doubles act from Alex and Charlotte, in which the real-life and circus relationship are intertwined as they support, swing from, and cradle each other. Faith’s youthful energy and stage presence is a delight – she is a fantastic, flexible flyer and it is so, so great to see such a laid back, skilled, gender-neutral performance from a teenage girl. Lee is a wonderful addition to the ensemble, fluid, physically graceful and expressive – and her duet with Alex is fantastic, two bodies of different ages / different genders moving together harmoniously, taking turns in holding and carrying the other. Its suggestion of mother-son relationship is particularly poignant in light of Lee’s own personal story.

Every element of the show – circus equipment, stage and costume design, music, lighting – has been thought through carefully and works brilliantly. An impressive team has worked on the show with the directors and performers – including musical maestro Max Reinhardt (yes, he of Radio 3 Late Junction fame), and costume maker Tina Bicat (see her article about her involvement with the company, here). The scenography works perfectly: a dark mirrored floor and back wall gives multiple reflections of each person (shadows of their former/later selves?), and feels like the perfect setting for the shiny silver aerial equipment (the company is as innovative as ever in their creation of new playgrounds for their performers!)

I have some reservations about some sections of text. I love everything in the piece that is about parenthood and inter-generational relationship, but there are slightly too many stories, overbalancing the piece a little, and the ones about schooldays and teenage experience could be cut, as they take the piece beyond the core themes of family love and support across the generations.

It is early days for the show, and it will only grow and grow. But even in its opening week, the piece feels full and rich. This Time really takes its time – and the gentleness, care and commitment in the making is there for all to see. A heart-warming and soul-nurturing circus theatre show.