I’ve been sung to by FK Alexander! I waited until she had taken off her black sequinned cabaret singer jacket, and her harness, and her not-silver (as in the original Wizard of Oz book), not-ruby red (as in the Judy Garland film) but sparkly coppery-gold shoes. I stood on the black cross on the floor and she noticed me and smiled and walked over to me, took my handwritten ‘admit one’ ticket, then went back and took a sip of water, put her harness and jacket back on again, re-applied her lipstick, and put the lovely shoes back on her feet. Ready.

She takes up her microphone, walks over, and stands in front of me. She smiles another, bigger, smile, takes my right hand in her left hand (her hand down, my hand up: the giver and receiver). She raises her right hand, holding the mic up high as the wonderfully intense and rich wash of industrial/sampled/layered sounds starts to crack and break into fragments of Over the Rainbow.

And then she sings to me: ‘Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high, there’s a land that I’ve heard of, once in a lullaby.’ All the other people in the room can see and hear this too, but she is singing to me. I sing back. Later, as I watch other people come forward enthusiastically, or fidget in their seats wondering if they’ll have the courage before jumping up hurriedly before someone else does, I enjoy noticing who stands very still and listens, allowing themselves to be washed over with the sounds and the experience, and who sings back to her or with her.

An hour passes very quickly. Perhaps nine or ten people are sung to directly? There is no allocated slot – you just take the space if you want to. The duration of the show is one hour, and when that hour is up, she stops, it stops.

She’s supported onstage by two other performers, musicians from Glasgow noise band Okishima Island Tourist Association – a man and a woman, both in black, wearing shades, standing perfectly straight and still behind their (music making) stations.

Oh and Judy Garland is here too, in a manner of speaking. Her voice is here in the mix, and her spirit is conjured. A deranged, distorted spirit, a ghost in the machine of sound; a spirit using the vessel of FK Alexander to stand in the spotlight once again. Or at least, to bask in the strobe flashes that are the climax of each one-to-one performance.

FK Alexander’s performance presence throughout is immense – beautifully held, controlled and in charge, loving and giving. The actions of donning and removing the ‘costume’ and the stance with the microphone, acknowledge the performance rituals and mores of the heavenly host of legendary divas and pop stars that are here with us, somehow. They also remind us of the power of ritual, on stage and in life. We all have our lucky jacket; our favourites shoes; our need to do things in the right order each time.

Alexander, who I’d previously seen and admired at SPILL Festival (London, 2015) is one of a number of contemporary performance artists working in the space between and around music and art. At that previous show, I’d seen her walk across hot coals accompanied by an intense barrage of sound so deep and strong that it penetrated to the bowels (as my friend and former colleague Genesis P Orridge might have put it). As a veteran of the Throbbing Gristle/Industrial Music scene, I feel that FK Alexander, and her collaborators on this show, are carrying the torch for the artistic intentions laid down in the 1970s that are sometimes referred to as ‘punk’ or ‘post punk’ or ‘industrial music’.

Yet the show is also, of course, her own thing. This is now, and she is out there.

This is an intense, vibrant, beautiful piece of performance art – delightfully different to most other work you are likely to see at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Once.

Once upon a time…

Once. But in another time, not this time. Another world, not this one. We have entered another world, another time. An ethereal world, outside the boundaries of space and time. (Ether is the substance that angels are made from…)

Once upon a time there was…

A pair of angels looking down upon a world. A tiny toy doll.

A cafe, with tables and chairs, and pictures of ships a-sailing. And a radio, pinned askew on a wall.

On the radio, a dancehall foxtrot.

In the cafe, which may well be the restaurant at the end of the universe, a waitress. A pretty doll-like girl in a little white dress and bunny ears, she trips merrily across the floor with her clickety-clackety high heels. She sits at a table and daydreams. She stands and tweaks her dress and ears. Someone who might be the janitor, someone of low status anyway, comes in pushing a broom across the floor, his vulture-like head jerking forwards, his tatty beige coat falling off his lanky frame – a downbeat clown, with big yellow shoes and a red nose. His heart is broken, that is obvious – he is wearing his heart on his sleeve. Enter the customer, a suave gentleman in a dapper black suit. He calls for the menu, he orders a fish. He’s obviously a fishy character…

These are our three main characters – or perhaps archetypes rather than characters is the better word, for we are in a world of fairy tales and dreams. The pretty ballerina, the princess, a version of Columbine; the heartbroken clown who wants to win her love; the suave dastardly villain who wants her too, and will fight him to the death for her love. Meanwhile, a very stupid cupid has come and gone – he seems too big for his own body, limbs akimbo like a young colt. He misses his target, fires offstage, breaks his arrows (and later his bow). He is useless.

The scene is set…

There follows a thrilling word-free montage of clever clowning sequences, eccentric and beautifully executed choreography, and gorgeous moving pictures – sometimes literally, as the painted storybook scenery  seemingly shifts itself, or the wonky pictures on the walls slide away to reveal startled faces.

The fairy-tale and mythological references come thick and fast. Here, a leaping and dancing Sinbad the Sailor (or maybe it’s the Prince of Persia) with his sabre flashing and cutting the air; there, a kind of Trojan Horse, a giant head hiding two people inside it. The simple props are used with a child-like glee: a cardboard fish on a dish is thrown across the room; a piece of piping becomes a periscope; a head pokes through a cardboard box tied up with a bow.

The soundscape is an eclectic musical mix – a kind of jukebox of cultural dreams and memories. Waltzes and polkas. Distorted fairground organs. Mournful blues numbers, and a cheesy rendition of Brazil.

Music and physical action work together beautifully. There’s a gentle repeated waltz motif as the Girl and the Suitor face each other from either side of the stage, stepping forward and back in time; and a joyous polka as they dance around the room together, as the Clown looks on in anger and despair. The Clown, seized by a demented desire, plays out a totally stupid and funny heavy-metal cock-rock dance with a cardboard falling star.

Once is one of Derevo’s lighter and gentler pieces of work – although not without its dark and dangerous edges. An hour and a half skips by quickly – we lap it all up eagerly.

It is great to see Derevo,  the Russian maestros of physical/visual theatre, back in the UK – and oh what a joy it is to see the company’s three founder members Anton Adasinsky (the heartbroken Clown), Elena Yarovaya (the lovely Girl) and Tanya Khabarova (the villainous Suitor) reunited on stage. All three give superb performances, working beautifully together. The trio of central performers are aided and abetted most ably by Aleksey Popov, Makhina Dzhurayeva and Aleksey Merkushev. The fabulous fairy-tale set is designed by Maxim Isaev.

Twenty years on, Once has an added poignancy – it is even more touching and funny and heartbreaking than it was 20 years ago. And with its universal theme of unrequited love and broken hearts, it is a timeless play that will never cease to entertain us and thrill us through and through. Love hurts, for sure.

Mexico: fiestas, salsa dancing in the street, big sombreros, jolly Mariachi bands, tasty enchilladas. Rewind. Mexico: women working 12-hour shifts in factories making parts for iPhones, fighting off the headache they get from not drinking water, because if they drink they need to pee, and if they leave their work station they are sacked. Police officers who pull 14-year-old girls into their police cars and take them to the woods to rape them. Mayors and company CEOs who claim to be saving the planet when in fact their actions are causing the local river to be so polluted that when a boy falls in trying to retrieve his football, he dies of arsenic poisoning 12 hours later.

Theatre Ad Infinitum’s Bucket List is a beautiful, harrowing, thought-provoking piece of work: a hard-hitting socio-political drama about Mexican (and world) corruption and contamination, delivered by an all-female international ensemble whose physical acting skills are superb. And there’s great live music too!

Inspiration for the show came from Mexican performer and co-devisor Vicky Araico Casas, who Ad Infintum’s Nir Paldi mentored and directed in her solo work, Juana in a Million. For both of them, one show was obviously not enough… There is more to be said about Mexico.

Bucket List – the company’s eighth show, which follows on from previous successes Translunar Paradise, The Ballad of the Burning Star, and Light – is written and directed by Paldi; he and co-director George Mann alternating roles of director and dramaturg on each new production. As is their usual practice, inspired by their training with Jacques Lecoq, the show has been co-created with the ensemble, which includes aforementioned Vicky Araico Casas as the protagonist Mila, and the company’s associate artist/musical director Amy Nostbakken, who gives an astonishing and brilliant performance as The Man, morphing from corrupt cop, to mayor, to company CEO, to president of Mexico, to Bill Clinton himself – instigator of the notorious North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTE) that has proved to be the cause of so many problems for working-class Mexicans. These transformations of character are made elegantly and beautifully with a shift in body stance changing her instantly from one to the other, the donning of a cap or sash, or the clever and humorous use of props such as a moustache on a stick, adding weight to the transformation.

Also in the ensemble are other familiar faces, including Deborah Pugh, who has appeared in all of the company’s past four shows, giving a dynamic and vibrant performance as both Mila’s mother, and as her youth leader and mentor Jennifer, who encourages her to improve her chess game, with the carrot dangled of a trip to America. But all of the ensemble are superb, swapping roles with ease, forming a physical chorus to support whichever character is the lead in any given scene.

So many lovely things in this show to flag up: a great use of recurring movement motifs: for example, a choreography of factory women’s gestures with the hands; and the way tiny snatches of salsa dancing are used as a throughout. Chess is the central metaphor of the piece, as Mila seeks (or fantasises about seeking – the line between the real and the imagined is deliberately blurry) her revenge on the men who have ruined the lives of her relatives and friends, finding parallels between her chess tactics and what she feels needs to do out their in world. The show appears to have a linear narrative at the start, but the pattern of foreshadowing and flashback comes in early. Harrowing moments in the story are replayed in a pattern of intense repetition.

The scenography is simple but beautifully effective. A kind of abbattoir cum hospital operating room plastic strip-curtain at the rear; podiums for the two musicians on either side of the curtain/backdrop; and a good lighting design. It’s quite enough: the play resides, for the most part, in the bodies of the performers.

The tussle between fantasy and reality is dealt with very effectively. As time runs out for Mila, her imagined solutions to her need for revenge become more and more ludicrous and fantastical. As the play ends, there is a sting in the tail. We are not let off lightly; we are not allowed to leave the theatre revelling in her revenge. There is a torch that we must carry for her, if Mila can’t carry it herself…

Featured image by Alex Brenner.

Theatre Ad Infinitum: Bucket List is at PLeasance Dome, 3-29 August, as part of the Edinburgh Fringe 2016.

For further information or bookings, see www.edfringe.com