What’s the difference between paradise and utopia? Some say that paradise is eternal – it always was, is, and will be – whereas a utopia is created, built knowing what has gone before, with the intention of making something better. So perhaps this show should be called The Utopia Project, as what it is about is starting from scratch, building a fresh new world.

Here’s our raw material: one woman (Stacey Sampsom) and one man (Jerry Killick, acclaimed Forced Entertainment performer). A white floor with checked black markings in the middle of this wide space. Galloons of water stacked stage right (in plastic bottles, which is not a very good start to a new world, but still). Some filing cabinets to each side. Wood, trestle legs, power tools.

The action is in two distinct performance modes. On the white floor, our new wave Adam and Eve spar, debating all sorts of philosophical, moral, and ethical conundrums. Is killing wrong? Lying? Stealing the other person’s water? This happens whilst they build their world, in real time, before our very eyes. They make a table, and some stools. They put walls up, and bring in a small set of stairs.

Every so often, one or other steps out of this space and goes to a filing cabinet, taking out a paper and reading. In this cabinet is the record of all that has gone before, all the history, all the mistakes made by humankind. We hear accounts of prisoners turfed out of vans, shot in the head for asking questions. Ancient trees cut down to make way for redevelopment. Demos against corrupt leaders. Pissing in fountains.

Our two prototype new humans fall out over the water allowance. How to resolve their differences? They try everything. One person one vote, first past the post. Proportional representation with a number of options as choices: rate your wishes 1, 2 or 3. ‘None of the above’ she says of choices 2 and 3, throwing a spanner in the works. All else fails, so they resort to scissors, paper, stone. Best of three, she declares when he wins. There’s always a way to get the result you need.

At one point he says ‘ I didn’t realise Paradise could be this boring’ and there lies the rub. Everything clean and bright and nice is not enough. If we have our basic needs met, we long for more. We’re willing to bite that apple in our longing for knowledge and experience and take our chances. To be thrown out into the nasty, dirty, messy, marvellously chaotic world outside. And so it goes.

The Paradise Project is created by Third Angel in collaboration with Mala Voadora – their former collaboration What I Heard About the World was shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award in 2012, and both productions boast sharp writing, great performance, and excellent scenography that goes beyond good design, making the visual landscape of the piece a crucial element of the content.

It is interesting to note that conception and design of The Paradise Project is credited jointly to both collaborating companies and the two performers, implying that the creation of the design was in intrinsic part of the devising of the piece. This is how it feels – words, physical action, and visual imagery seamlessly interweaved. Both actors are totally at home in their stage environment, a delight to watch and listen to – you really do forget they are acting a lot of the time, which is perhaps the highest compliment.

The Paradise Project is presented at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as part of Northern Stage at Summerhall. 

Photographic flipbooks, sometimes called flicker-books. You know what I mean? Those little things you flick with your thumb, producing an instant mini animation? Volker Gerling makes them. He  picks a subject, asks them to pose, takes 36 clickety-click shots in 12 seconds, then uses high-quality photographic paper to produce beautiful and unique artworks.

He shows us what it feels like to be one of his models by turning his camera on us. We, his audience, pose for a group photo, but as the 12 seconds  – a long time! – unfolds, and we are amused and distracted by the loud shutter clicks, we dissolve a little, smile, blink, wipe our hair from our brow, glance at our neighbour. That’s what happens.

Gerling then tells us how he finds his subjects, and how he disseminates his work. At first he played it safe and went to the arty bars and cafes of hometown Berlin, picking subjects, and showing the small flipbooks, free to audience, but with donations gratefully accepted. Then he realised he needed to be braver, to go further afield, literally and metaphorically. Out into the small villages of Germany, and beyond, he went – and still goes. He’s walked over 3,500km so far.

What he does is walk with a tent on his back, and on his front a tray (a cigarette-girl or popcorn-seller style tray, attached to his shoulders). He carries no food or money. He makes friends. He invites people to view his exhibition of flipbooks. He also sometimes approaches people and asks them to be models for a new book. We hear stories about the people he has met: Alfred, who invites him into his house to show him the bed where his wife died, and who still has a wardrobe full of snazzy suits from his youth, offers Gerling a glass of Schnapps and some chocolate; a young boy called Alex who is swimming in the canal with his friends, chuffed that he has been singled out to be a model; a mother and daughter called Sofia and Francesca, who are more like friends, and who write small texts about each other for the artist.

This small but perfectly formed theatre show is so much more than a lecture-demonstration about the walks and the flipbooks. It is also an investigation of the very nature and processes of both photography and cinema. Gerling stands at a lectern with an overhead projector, and he slowly flips through a book, a simple portrait of one person. The slight flickers in her eyelids, the little smile at the corner of her mouth that comes and goes… it is beautiful, utterly beautiful. We meet a whole host of people who are subjects of flipbook portraits. A handsome Iranian man whose body is wasting away; three teenagers, a loving couple and their gooseberry friend who stares ahead embarrassed as her friends kiss; a family of four, the smallest child wiggling and the bigger one pulling faces. They have simple unemotive titles: Older Man with Tie, Man with Baseball Cap, Woman With Shawl etc. One flipbook called Two Boys Fishing has no movement, seemingly. Each book is flicked three times, and after the second showing of this one, Gerling says ‘look at the grass by the boy on the right’s shoulder” and yes –it’s moving in the wind. He quotes St Paul: ‘What we see comes from what we do not see.’

Our artist is mostly interested in people, but he has also branched out to do time-lapse flipbooks of apartment blocks (one shot every 2o minutes throughout the night), the moon moving across a night sky behind a cathedral, and an extraordinary ‘film’ of a candle in a cafe burning down over 7 hours.

Because, yes – these are films, this is cinema. Flipbook cinema, but cinema. Portraits in motion, in fact. Seeing the images on a big screen, we believe we are seeing moving image. Because we are. The filming process is no different – it is just that the gap between frames is smaller. Gerling celebrates the gaps, and exploits the play with time offered by his process, flicking through the books at different speeds to produce different effects.

A truly charming and thought-provoking show that gets to the core of what it means to capture an image; and that also adds a beautiful example to the growing body of work created by artists for whom walking is at the heart of their practice.

Portraits in Motion is presented at Summerhall by Aurora Nova. 

Yellow bird, oh so pretty, perches on a wooden bench, then clambers amongst the audience. She’s sweet and smiley, wearing a 1950s style cotton sundress with a pretty print of lemons and leaves. She clambers over the steeply tiered seats of Summerhall’s Demonstration Room, whispering in people’s ears. I have the best seat in the house. I know because a little bird told me. To get to my seat I had to scramble over a body slumped on the floor – another young woman, this one in a smart black skirt and jacket, wearing one patent leather high-heeled shoe. A pool of vomit is next to her mouth. Also in the space is a monitor playing a video; images of a woman with long platinum hair diving onto a sofa. There’s a fourth presence, a voice-over (also female): ‘I saw you in the supermarket choosing cheese..’ says the voice, then rather more surreally ‘I saw you eating digestives on the beach with Patsy Cline…’

Yellow bird girl, still smiling, clambers down onto the stage, and tries to perch somewhere there. She perches on stools, on the TV monitor, in mid-air, on the body prone on the floor. A swing! There’s a swing! She perches on that, swinging and smiling, a caged bird on a swing. The body on the floor splutters into life, gagging and spitting. She staggers up, moves around in a lop-sided jiggle, one shoe off and one shoe on. She moves into a rigorous gestural choreography, then into an intense duet of slaps and falls and catches with bird girl. And that’s just the start! The next hour is exhausting and exhaustive for both audience and performers. There’s no let up, and these young women have no fear. Far from shying away from danger, they confront it. Sexually provocative posture and posturing is played with, exploited, and undermined. Lying on their fronts, Lolita-like in novelty shades, licking a giant ice lolly, hair blown in the fake wind of a cheap electric fan, they bask in the glory of the gaze coming their way,  then return the gaze defiantly. Images of winsome women, wanton women, women losing it, women putting up with it through gritted teeth, women out of control, women abused and abusing – it’s all here, presented using a fabulous language of physical, visual and verbal absurdism. They laugh! They cry! They dance! Perhaps they’ll peck each other to death, who knows?

Hysterically funny in the darkest possible way. Nice and nasty. Visceral, juddering theatre. If you want a comfortable night out, this isn’t for you. If you want to be shaken and stirred, amused and disturbed in equal measures, go.

Project HaHa runs at Summerhall throughout August, everyday except Monday.

You know when you’re reading a story to a child and they say ‘again!’ and you have to go back and tell it again? That. Our storyteller is Seth Kriebel, but he isn’t sitting in a cosy armchair, and there is no fringed standard lamp by his side. He’s sat at a desk lit by Anglepoise lamps, speaking into a mic, a blue screen behind him. Or an orange screen. You choose. One is yes and one is no. One is left and one is right. one is up and one is down. Stay on the train? Get off the train? Open the suitcase? Leave the suitcase unopened? Life is full of choices, but unlike life, here we get a second chance. Back we go to start again, and again. Cast your vote – this is a democracy. Majority rule.

We This Way is a clever take on both traditional storytelling and contemporary interactive game-playing. The archetypal world of fairy tales is richly mined: there’s a hidden staircase down to an underground world and a line of discarded shoes (The Twelve Dancing Princesses come to mind). A staircase in a tower (Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Sleeping Beauty). We meet a Minotaur in reading glasses. We find a fairground, and enter a hall of mirrors.  Elsewhere, down other paths, there are lighthouses, boats and treasure hunts. Glass slippers. Ruby slippers. Red shoes. Winged sandals.

The stories wend and weave – sometimes linear, sometimes circular, often spiralling. It’s a complex piece to deliver, the performer at the mercy of the audience, who determine which paths to take. But we’re in safe hands – Seth Kriebel knows what he’s doing, and does it very well. We travel through a multiplicity of worlds without leaving our seats, enchanted – a simple but spellbinding piece of theatre.

 We This Way was commissioned by and developed at Battersea Arts Centre. At Summerhall every day except Tuesdays throughout August, 12.25