Ruins – Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Part of Edinburgh’s Manipulate Festival 2024, Ruinsis a multi-media dance performance involving three humans, locked within a video cube, who represent the last of the human race, kept alive by machines.

Created by Megahertz, a visual theatre company and relying on wordless, highly expressive, beautiful movement from Philip Alexander McDonald, Rita Hu and Suzi Cunningham, the performance is set against an extraordinary soundscape by Cucina Povera and Jamie Grier.

The fourth star of this show is the video cube itself, which is extraordinary. Projections from three different directions onto a gauzelike material on a thin metal frame creates the impression of semi-solid walls surrounding the figures and hologram-like images seem to float unhindered within the cube. The effect is mesmerising and hypnotic.

The dancers clothed in the briefest skintight skin-coloured Lycra are effectively naked. There is individual movement and combined movement, smooth and fluid at one moment then fragile and brittle at others set to the sound of breaking crockery and glass.

In one scene the three strain and writhe to emerge from their individual chrysalis-like sacs, screaming soundlessly in rebirth, fully formed but babylike, slimy, with gaping mouths and barely functioning arms and legs. In another memorable moment the three combines into one organism with six arms and six legs, swaying and flailing, the light low against a bright background creates the silhouette of a nightmarish image.

Not for the faint hearted this features strobe lighting and at times pounding electronic music, and dance costumes that leave very little to the imagination. There is a rawness and truth in the movement and expression of the dancers, tribal, primitive.

This is a sensory explosion which at times is overpowering and any storyline trying to be conveyed by the dancers is very much lost in the matrix. It feels like the technology is leading the dance here, indeed there is also the option to wear a haptic belt to increase the sensory flow. It is exciting to see, hear and feel this performance, at the cutting edge of modern technology, even if it is not fully understandable, it is certainly an experience.

Reviewer: Greg Holstead

Reviewed: 11th February 2024

North West End UK Rating: