Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Book of Dew
Tide and Foam Productions
Genre: Circus, Dance, Experimental, Shadow Puppets
Venue: Zoo Playground
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A miniature choreography of visual poetry, objects and body parts, Book of Dew weaves a spider web of fantastical fragments: water droplets, a river in the air, glistening stardust – the dew of transient experience emerges and evaporates under sunrise. At the intersection of puppetry, installation, and non-linear storytelling, this intimately-staged performance features a single wall, in which doors of ephemerality open and close
Review
The Book of Dew begins as you enter the theater, a tiny theater, with a tiny stage- the audience (very close-up) faces a wall, and as you wait for the action to begin, small doorknobs become visible in windows in the wall surface. This is the zeitgeist of “Book of Dew”; you wait and experience and see a little bit more the longer you look- Part childrens’s bedtime story, and part theater of revelation it is a delightful 55 minutes where you follow the story of Spider, Moon and Dew in your own private cinema.
This is hand puppet theater where the hands are the puppets, and they open and close the tiny windows in the wall. The devices of story- telling range from recorded spoken word to cloth or paint moving in water, to cut outs or dangling webs of light. The plot is revealed through the coming and going of the hands that find the little door knobs and reveal the next image. The surprise lies in anticipating what door will open next, and what will be seen as we pursue the vision of dew and spiderwebs and follow the impossible love of a creature of the night and creature of the day- there are many moments of delight and two of my favorites are the meeting of the hand lovers and the moment when the moon breaks the proscenium wall. I will say no more.
The work is new as we were told by the two young creator/performers, and there were moments that seemed slightly rushed when the internal logic of the presentation didn’t quite make sense. Some of the metaphors between script and imagery do not quite follow. But this is a new work (as was revealed by the two performers when they came out for a bow at the end) and I trust it will find its full rhythm and form as they continue to perform. The score underneath the images was spot on, and for the most part, you felt immersed in a gentle world of enchantment. This is a Hidden Gem.
