Friday evening at Dance Base, and a jolly audience laugh out loud as performers Chess Dillon-Reams and Cristina MacKerron, reveal their innermost thoughts and conversations, drawing us into their friendship through a mixture of charisma and sheer will. The cyclical narrative of May-We-Go-Round? gives the audience an insight into their dating sagas complete with emotional torment and the subsequent response of the supportive friend. Both women shift between caring and offloading, taking centre-stage and forming a one-(wo)man chorus by mirroring or clapping a tambourine behind, in a shared relationship of mutual respect and understanding.

There is a growing trend towards celebrating womanhood, and a female friendship taking centrestage over the traditional love story does just that. Here this dynamic pair explore growth, identity and life’s knockbacks with tenderness and outright silliness. They use a vocabulary of hip hop and contemporary dance, laced with an over-emphasised mimicking and mocking style which illustrates narratives and emotions with humour. Fast footwork, ridiculous pelvic thrusts, quirky gestures and expansive leaps and falls, top rocking and cheesy jazz inform the rich dancing that takes the audience through these girls’ trials and tribulations.

Fast transitions between gendered behaviours see the energy suddenly hiked up towards exhaustive climaxes. Chess and Cristina (as they refer to themselves throughout), repeat flirty poses, pointing their legs and toes whilst repeating elongated ‘ooooohs’. Speech and movement distort and grow into an embodiment of an angry, sexually motivated, ‘geezer’. Fast moving, talking and grunting, these women can be ‘male’ if they so desire; worship the men they put on pedestals, or expose male behaviours at their crudest and rudest.

From a beat-boxed heartbeat to flirty peacocking and bold camaradery, the physical embodiment of signs, gesture, and grounded movement mock and mimic the subject. There is a hoody pas de deux, a bra-swinging port de bras, and even time to share a vodka and cranberry with an already half-baked audience!

The skipping phrase enforced on them to break up each story perfectly demonstrates the boredom of life’s disappointments, and the tedium of having it thrust upon you again and again. The structure of the work broken up by these plodding pathways balances the reliving of experiences with outrageous passion and energy, giving all time to recover.

Men in the audience laugh from their very core, but the joke is on them. They will never experience something as strong and dynamic as this female friendship which portrays women as kind, compassionate, strong and expressive of emotion with the ability to understand and deal with it. It also allows them to take on male characteristics whilst happily donning heels and getting dressed together to hit the town a minute later. Women can and are all these things and the male love interests are a mere sideshow to what is really at play here.

The sections that frame and draw a raucous piece into our hearts and minds are where one narrates the rise and fall of the other’s relationship. Whether it be with Matt with the blonde spiky hair, or the fit PE Teacher, each epic narrative is reduced to few statements whilst the girl dresses with an extra item of clothing, a tiny bit more with each spoken phrase. We see her pause and begin to undress as the narrative takes a turn in a shifting in and out of love and in and out of identities. In a story that every women can relate to, this chapter for the girls is bought to a close by the donning of all the items from every boy and every relationship at the same time. They cover, smother, protect and embellish a multi-layered identity that is stripped bare ready for the next chapter of adventures.

May-We-Go-Round is one for everywoman, full of tears and laughter.

Your Majesties throws into a cool blue light Barack Obama’s Nobel Lecture held at the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony in Oslo in 2009. The work maintains a cool minimalist ambience which allows audiences to consider and interrogate the text. A complex choreography of everyday gestures that flow between the surprising and the mundane illustrate, unpack, poke fun at and expose the text as a carefully orchestrated pantomime.

A man and a woman use movement to illustrate language – the relationships between friends and lovers, the relationship between a president and his people, between war and peace, between a wave and a lunge, are thrown under the microscope. This exposure of social etiquette throws up inconsistencies, by altering the connection between known signs in both speech and movement. Both performers’ backgrounds in translation inform this exemplary work of semiotics that is timely and poignant in the current political climate.

As Deutinger deliver’s Obama’s speech, his movements become bigger, more exaggerated and grotesque whilst his delivery of the text remains perfectly poised and clear. Navaridas performs the same set of movements mirroring him. She is placed on a plinth in the audience who have to strain to watch her and can never fully view both performers in one glance. There are a series of disconnects here that highlight a dislocation between politics and society. Navaridas’ movements are tender and flow with ease, they form a dance that compels us to watch. Deutinger mirrors these movements with an awkward style that throws into light the choreographed nature of speeches. Navaridas becomes a puppeteer who’s dynamics and expression does not fully translate into her puppet. The juxtaposition of their movement styles, of the two views offered to the audience and between Deutinger’s words and postures begin to deconstruct the speech.

The satirical content, is abundant with nuances and movements that expose, undermine, question or support a word, a sentence or a sentiment. With a multi-faceted vocabulary, Your Majesties will pique an interrogative mind and every political interest. From whistling, rolling around holding their bare feet, to gurning, particular sections are chosen to be undermined in particular ways. A series of coloured cards are held up by the silent, female referee, from yellow to red – and it is time for the blue one. A monologue satisfied, a dance complete, the words of this speech still linger as the pair exit their brief political tenancy.

Your Majesties can be heavy going at times, but it will appeal to the thinker.

Both love and dance can pop up unexpectedly from different places at various times. Sometimes just a look, or perhaps a piece of music, can bring them out into the open, either separately or together. Both can be infectious. It’s not uncommon, when we see a couple kissing, to feel the same desire. It’s the same with dance – when one body moves freely, allowing itself to express its feelings freely, sometimes we start to move unconsciously. Or we can decline to take up the offer we learn to subjugate the desire. Unfortunately, we are more often than not restricted by the things that we’ve planned to do in our busy lives – to work, to wait, to drink, to…  and we close down our perceptions and inclinations.

POP-UP Duets (fragments of love) is a site-specific dance performance in a museum, choreographed by the award-winning Janis Claxton, with  music by renowned composer Pippa Murphy. The team includes four world-class dancers: James Southward, Christina Liddell, Carlos J Martinez and Crystal Zillwood. The performance is inspired by the theme of love, and the possibilities of love, expressed in many different forms of composition – men dancing with men, women with women, and men with women. The dancers start from within the audience, suggesting that love can appear from anywhere, independent of the situation and the place. The choreography is strong and beautiful, precisely drawing the bodies in the space. The bodies slide across each other; the movements flow fluidly. There is a lightness to them; they almost take flight.  The body in love, we seem to be told, is light and adaptable,. There is no leader, no hierarchy – it is a dialogue. Gender roles are subverted – love gives them power: a woman can lift a man and vice-versa; they give support to the other. Bodies love each other just because it happens: it can be only for an instant or for a whole life. But even if just for an instant, the presence of love can be potent while it happens; whilst their bodies meet.

The sound design completes the show: speakers appear here and there, moved from place to place (it’s as if they have legs and arrive at each location in the museum of their own accord). They play a crucial role in moving the audience from room to room – people are attracted by the sound, which is the invitation to move on. The museum itself is a beautiful space, and there are moments in which the choreography and the space are in perfect harmony – for example, when they use columns or fountains to work with or around.

As a site-specific experience, it feels that the space itself isn’t the principle inspiration, for the most part – this feels like a piece that could work in many different public spaces. But the piece seemed to have a positive and infectious influence on the people around it: during the show we could see couples cuddling together; and children dancing around the room, using their bodies freely to express themselves.

In the performance theme and in the choreography itself – so fluid, connected, adaptable, and liquid – the work reminds me of the philosophical writings of Baumann. But perhaps that is another story…

It Folds is a harrowing, heartbreaking and sometimes darkly humorous investigation of death and grief. It is mostly the story of lost children. Children abused or abducted or run over or gone missing, permanently. It is a story told by a (holy) ghost in a sheet with holes for the eyes, and trainers; a dishevelled, twitching angel; a pantomime horse with a rebellious rear end; and a banjo-playing, grieving mother.

The onstage world presents us with a series of disturbing dream images, conjuring up a bardo of becoming beyond death for those who have departed, and the confused and frightened imaginings and memories and rituals of those who are left behind.

Objects – real or imagined – play an important part. There are at least two pairs of broken spectacles spoken of – a blue plastic pair found somewhere near where a dead boy might be buried, and a distraught father’s specs with a broken lens that he dons to read an eulogy to his son at the funeral (much to the embarrassment of the boy’s friends). As for real onstage objects: we have a toy horse pinata dangling from the ceiling and an ornate padded chair. That’s our lot. Everything else is in or on the bodies of the performers. A tatty horse costume, a gold cardboard party hat, a blindfold, a stick…

It Folds is a collaboration between Total Theatre Award winning theatre company Brokentalkers, and dance-theatre company Junk Ensemble. Both companies are based at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin. The piece is a perfect mesh of the two company’s styles and mores. Brokentalkers’ talent with earthy, deconstructed, poetic text; an interesting and surreal exploration of physical object and costume; and ritualised action is very present. See, for example scenes that give us an older woman talking to an empty suit sat in a chair;  re-enactments of a visit to seek the advice of a spirit guide; or the repeated motif of the happy birthday song that recurs throughout the show. The beautifully real and edgy choreography from Junk Ensemble includes a wonderful duet between two men – an older, sturdier man moving and manipulating and imposing upon a boyish and slim figure who stiffly leans and falls whilst being hugged and pulled about, then is dragged across the floor whilst straight as a plank. It makes for an extraordinary and disturbing picture of abuse.

There is a large cast, the professional actors/dancers joined by a community choir who play a host of ghosts singing angelically. But often the stage is occupied by just two or three performers at a time. There is space to breathe – visual images, exchanges of words, or choreographic sections are allowed to play out; to have the time and space to work their way into our imaginations.

Disturbing, but not distressing – a surreal exploration of the elephant (or stuffed horse) in all of our rooms, death. We are the dead.

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.