We are led to a wooden cabin at the rear of Summerhall, a wee building put together lovingly using a quirky assortment of new pine and found wood, like a little fairy-tale house in the woods. We are grateful to get out of the torrential rain. Somewhere to shelter; a temporary home.

Yinka has entered with us, as if it were her home, and she was bringing us in. Which it is, and she is. We are given tea in big metal mugs, and little biscuits shaped like houses. She tells us that her mother thinks that the biscuits don’t quite work, don’t really look like houses, but I think they do. Anyway, she has baked them and they are sweet and tasty. The rain hammers down. How good it is to have shelter, to have four walls and a roof to protect you, and some hot tea. She takes off her raincoat and sits down behind a table that is occupied just by a box of filing cards/photos and an old-school Sony Walkman cassette player and tapes. And the stories begin…

One Hundred Homes is, as you’d expect, a show about home and homes. A hundred people were visited and interviewed about their home, or lack of a home; their attitude to what ‘home’ means to them, to what makes a home.

Her interviewees include people who live in houses, people who live in flats, people who live on farms, people who live in vans, and people who live on  houseboats. There are people who live in grand houses, people who live in squats, and people who live on the streets. Some people have lived in the same house all their lives; some people move constantly through choice; and some have been forced to move, to flee war zones and seek refuge elsewhere. She interviews her own family, and she interviews old school friends. She interviews total strangers and old friends, in her home town of Ghent and in Amsterdam.

The performer’s mode is ‘storyteller’ rather than ‘verbatim’, although she does incorporate the actual words of her interviewees as and when it fits the dramaturgy of the piece. The stories are told in many and various ways – all engaging and inventive. Some are straightforward, some are gently deconstructed and rearranged. Sometimes Yinka recites lists – for example, of names (she says all 100, with hardly a pause for breath). She gives us lists of the types of food and drink she has been offered – tea here, coffee there. Beer here, Coca Cola there. Candies, cakes, even full-blown dinners. These lists are like litanies; a recurring motif.

She turns her attention to the filing cards, and as she takes out each card, she places the photo with it onto the headband she wears – holding the image in place with a peg. It is lovely to see her taking on a token of each person’s identity in this way, as she reads their words, and tells us more about the encounter. The photos show us a couple in love, living together in harmony; a woman who has separated from her partner; a woman who has migrated from Turkey with her whole family; a young man (her own brother!) who lives with his parents but keeps all his belongings in a van; a middle-aged man who is a veteran squatter. All human life is here – men, women and children who started life in very many different places and have somehow all gravitated to the same geographical locations.

Not everyone has a photo. On one occasion, her interviewees plied her so generously with red wine over dinner that she was incapable of using her camera. On another occasion, she interviewed a heavily pregnant woman she met at a soup kitchen in a railway station. The woman went into labour. Yinka broke her self-imposed rules and followed up with a hospital visit to see mother and new born, and the woman’s two other children, safe and warm in a hospital room. She wears the baby’s hospital ID card on her headband. Two days later, the family had to leave. She has no idea where they went.

The joy in the piece is in witnessing the amazing range of human stories and responses encountered and retold. Some people live somewhere for decades and never feel at home. Others, like the couple from Iraq who have fled war, say that home is where their partner is; home is the people, not the place.

I enjoy the fact that the project is more than a theatre show – it is an ongoing art project, Yinka continuing to meet and interview people in every place she travels to. So we can expect Edinburgh to feature in a future incarnation of the work. I like the fact that we got one song, sung by an interviewee, played on the Walkman, but it would have been nice to hear a few more voices.

One Hundred Homes is a beautifully constructed piece of theatre from a young Belgian artist who has the ability to communicate directly with the audience, making everyone feel at home in her presence. Nice biscuits, too.

One Hundred Homes is presented at Summerhall as art of the Big in Belgium programme.

‘I am Natalie and I like to do handstands. When I do a handstand  I feel strong and straight as a rocket. When I do handstands people notice me.’

This is a show that features Natalie Reckert doing an endless number of handstands and hand-balances on canes, and is almost exclusively about Natalie doing handstands and balances: the whens, the why’s, the wherefores. It is this, and it is so much more – the ability to do a handstand, and to stay upside down for long times, is used as a push-up point from which to launch an autobiographical reflection on life as a physical performer / circus artist. Sometimes Natalie feels as strong as a rocket, but sometimes she feels as fragile as an egg. The eggs come out to play brown ones because, ‘ it is so hard to get white eggs here’, and there is a contest to find the strongest one; the egg that survives the balances and body-smashes. Here it is, the super-egg, in its place of honour. Ta-da!

Natalie noticed early in life that some things get attention. Throwing her ice cream out of her pram, for example. A little older, around the age of five, she learnt to do a handstand, her gym teacher holding up her legs. She demonstrates, without the teacher to steady her. She is straight and strong as a rocket. She liked the attention being good at handstands got her; she made a life’s work of it. She talks to us from all sorts of strange positions: upside down, balancing one-handed on the canes, twisted or curved around the equipment. Sometimes, she says, I am as supple as a piece of liquorice.

These sections of beautiful moves counter-balanced with her autobiographical reminiscences and reflections on the nature of physical performance are totally gripping. I also enjoy her object play with the balancing equipment, the eggs, a fan and confetti, and with the white tissue paper her balancing canes are wrapped in, which she calls ‘sandwich paper’, the words sounding endearing when delivered with her charming German accent. The word-free sections of electro-robotic dance and gestural movement motifs I like less – her dance choreography and execution is so much less than her circus skills, and the discrepancy makes for a slightly uneven performance, although I do find the vogueing moves amusing.

But for the most part, I love it. I love her, I love her story, I love her honesty and her self-exposure. The show’s title is appropriate – the whole show is a kind of selfie, a reflection on putting yourself in the centre of the picture. This is a funny, but also moving and thought-provoking, show about the choice to use your body as your art, your instrument.

A phone rings; a warning to turn off our mobiles. Lights. Low, moody lights. Three bodies – two male and one female, in minimal sporty underwear; fit and honed bodies – are curled up on the floor. There is some flexing and contorting of their back and shoulder muscles, a bit of writhing and twitching. A typical start to a contemporary dance piece. Beautiful but bori…

‘Boring!’ A voice booms out. Up bounces the female dancer, and the other two drag themselves up sheepishly. Boring, this is boring, she says… One of the others counter-argues: that was only five minutes, we could easily do that for 15 minutes. We laugh. We’ve been there, on one or other side of the footlights. How better to start the show? Let’s start with my solo, she says. She stands, she dances, stretching  her limbs. The men have put on rehearsal trousers or shorts and baggy T-shirts. The man in the shorts takes on the role of director, shouting up to the sound operator, ‘ play track 2’. A schmaltzy tune comes on, something about love, emotion, devotion. The dancer glares at him. Cut. That won’t do.  Cue Hallelujah. A duet between the woman and the man in shorts. All going fine until the other guy decides to join in, singing from the pulpit, revealed at the rear of the stage when he pulls back the blacks.

Contemporary? aims to both send up and celebrate the Lithuanian contemporary dance scene. When I read that in the programme, I feared it might be too specific and not translate, but never fear, it is universal – every experience any of us have ever had in the rehearsal studio, anywhere at anytime, is here on this stage!  The agonised tag between getting your own way, and fitting in with the group. The alternating of roles as performer and outside eye. The worries that things will be too obscure, or too obvious, the giving of feedback that ends up being hilariously careful not to offend whilst offending. The agonised conversations about costumes: I want a red dress, says the woman – something elegant. She probably has Pina Bausch in mind. You look good like that, it is very ‘dance’, says one of the men, as she stands there in her black underwear. We laugh, of course we laugh…

A favourite scene sees shorts-man doing an impro with props: a bucket, a handful of feathers, a plastic strip, a pair of trainers (‘they’l be high heels, this is just for now.’) The ‘impro’ itself and the discussion afterwards on its meaning (involving the audience) is brilliantly funny. And I love the scene where the woman (still in her underwear) sits out in the audience shouting out choreographic instructions to the two men: ‘ More power – yes! – stronger. More like men! Hup! Jump! Hup!’ They bounce around more and more manically, ending up panting like dogs.

We do, eventually, get the show we’ve seen them making. The phone rings, again – the warning about turning off mobiles. They enter, and we see the reconstruction of the deconstruction. It’s a lovely piece of contemporary dance, made all the lovelier by us seeing what they’ve kept and what they’ve discarded. The bucket and feathers don’t make it to the final mix, and there are no high heels…

A plain and unadorned space, a circle drawn on the ground, a light, a chair. And a body. A human body. A bag of bones.

The body belongs to Thomas Monkton, seen previously at the Edinburgh Fringe and the London International Mime Festival with The Pianist. But Only Bones is a very different kettle of fish. Where The Pianist gives us stage full of kit and sees the performer explore a clownish relationship to objects – a grand piano, curtains, chandeliers, sheet music – Only Bones strips almost all else away and objectifies the body, Monkton reducing himself to modelling material. Except of course he’s not – with every clever trick, every brilliantly executed physical vignette, we are simultaneously enjoying seeing the body and its parts twisted and turned into all sorts of things, whilst yet appreciating the (super) human effort behind it. Ultimately, it’s a show about the human body, and being human.

So, what happens? We start off with socks, seemingly three socks on three feet, perched on the chair seat. But it is not three feet, it is two feet and a socked hand, in a kind of stand-off. Enter the other hand, bare, and things get even more bizarre. Now we have two hands like scuttling spiders. And a hand that tortures the other hand with red nail varnish. Now we seem to be looking at the back view of a headless man, his (jazz) hands enjoying a dance above his non-head, illuminated by an electric blue light.

Ah yes, the light! The bulb in the lamp above the performer’s head – or non-head –  changes colour with each small scene. A deep maroon for underwater swimming (jellyfish or human!), for example. At first a straightforward change of state for each vignette, but then Monkton starts to subvert and play with this, getting rid of the deep water tank he can’t escape from by changing the bulb colour… There is also a lovely point at which the lampshade becomes a head, and a baby Anglepoise is cuddled – a perfect puppetry moment.

In many ways, the show is puppetry. No puppetry of the penis (thank the lord) but puppetry of the head, face, hands, arms, feet, legs, spine… This man’s ability to contort and manipulate his body is breathtaking.

There’s sound too – onomatopoeic moos and baaas in a silly (and very lovely) scene in which animals combine to form new hybrids, with some help from the audience. This moves into a kind of reverse beat-boxing or body percussion, in which sounds from inside have a forceful effect on the body. Eventually, all is resolved and here we are, looking at man, just a man, who is looking back at us.

Only Bones is a delightful show delivered by a highly skilled performer (who certainly knows his way around his own body) investigating the place where the circus arts of clowning and contortion meet puppetry and object theatre.  Bravo, that man!

High up in the space, curled up around a rope, is a body, and as the show starts, the body descends, falls with a thud. A confused young woman in a smart black trouser suit and red shirt looks out to us.

I remember, she says… I remember…

She remembers crossing the road, her mobile vibrating, it’s her brother and she doesn’t want to talk to him, she finds it hard to talk to him, she’s bought some socks for her dad because all the ones he has have holes in them, people say he drinks too much, she can see this guy Gil who she likes. Her first thought is: someone has screwed up; her second thought is, oh it’s me that’s screwed up; her third thought is, I don’t want Gil to see this…

I remember…Grace, I’m Grace, she says.

Grace, we learn, is many things – a lover, a mother (of twins who she gave up for adoption), a photographer. The narrative circles around a snapshot of one moment in time that explodes outwards into a world of possibilities.The story is not obscure – it becomes obvious pretty early on that our heroine has been the victim of a road accident; that the one moment in time is the moment of impact with a truck ‘the driver’s eyes, terrified…’ But where is she now? In recovery? In a coma? Facing the moment of death? Throughout the piece, Grace can be heard repeating the mantra: I didn’t expect think this would be me. We none of us think it’ll ever happen to us…

Grace is a solo circus-theatre show performed by Emma Serjeant, previously of Circa and then Casus. With Casus, she co-created the Total Theatre Award shortlisted show Knee Deep, but has now left to pursue a more thoughtful brand of circus that has something to say about the big issues. Grace first started life as the Casus show Jerk, but has now been substantially redirected and enhanced by Emma and her collaborators, director John Britton and a video-maker and sound-designer. It is a richer, fuller show than it was – although part of me misses the rawness of that first outing as Jerk.

It goes without saying (although I will say it anyway) that with a performer of this pedigree, the circus skills are exceptional. She climbs, swings, falls, tumbles, bounces up in breathtaking volleys, engaging with floor and air magnificently. But the unique selling point of this piece is not the skills – fabulous though they are – but how those circus tricks and turns are employed in the telling of the tale.

The narrative is both a story in its own right, and a way of reflecting on and facing head-on the dangers and fears of being a circus performer. In their employment in the telling of Grace’s story, and in the parallel exploration of the dangers of the artform, the various items of circus kit are used brilliantly. Aerial equipment offers the opportunity to swing high, wild and free, and to play on and with the fear of falling and crashing; hand-balancing equipment is wobbly, so she plays with balance and with throwing herself off-balance; tiny hoops can contain and trap the body, so are an excellent metaphor for a body trapped in a nightmare physical experience.

There are other, quirkier circus skills employed too: the speciality object-up-the-nose trick is here re-invented with balloons in a flashback party scene of simultaneously evokes the out-of-control experience of drug-taking, and a suggestion of hospital breathing tubes and feeders forced into a struggling body. The sounds of laboured breathing feature in the soundtrack, merging nicely and echoing the real-time breath of the performer who is throwing herself full-pelt around the space, again tying together the story of Grace and the story of Emma…

The text is a mixture of live and pre-recorded text, mixed in with the composed soundtrack (ambient sound, samples and intense, beat-driven electronic music). The onscreen video work is in part a reinforcement of the narrative, but mostly operates as a scenic tool, creating a backdrop to the live performance. It is often showing us hazy black and white images of what could be human figures (echoing Grace’s slipping in and out of consciousness in her hospital bed), this alternating with vibrant washes of colour – reds or violets – that reflect Grace’s mood swings and levels of consciousness.

The relationship with the audience is interesting. At one point in the show, she leaves the stage to take Polaroid photos with audience members that capture the moment, the here and now and liveness of this event, and also reinforcing the core ‘snapshot moment in time’ motif running through the show. Police incident tape is also put to good use…

Grace is many things. The character we are presented with is a complex and not always loveable one, although we love her honesty and her growing self-awareness. As an example, she relives her thoughts about cheating on her boyfriend at his own birthday party, and asks herself: What sort of person am I? What sort of person does this? Here and now – on what might be her death bed – Grace is re-evaluating her life, growing, changing. Where there is life, there is still the possibility of personal development, of soul work, regardless of what is happening to the physical body.

The show is an excellent example of how circus skills and theatre narrative (expressed through words, images and actions) can be successfully brought together.

A brave and beautiful piece of work – and a show that anyone interested in the space where circus meets theatre should see.