Edinburgh Fringe 2021
Silver Feet
Akiko Dance Project
Genre: Dance, Dance and Movement Theatre
Venue: Dance Base Online@Fringeplayer
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe, Fringe Online
Low Down
A woman enters the space. In it is a series of feet and pole sculpted out of what looks like silver foil is our setting. Delicate and precise sculptures are scattered around the space. There are equally delicate movements practiced by our guide and performed as she takes up the sculptures and dances with them, then they take here, there and thither. Starting slowly, she moves onto being at one with the sculptures and her own feet dance off and on the scenery until the finale.
Review
Perhaps the most interesting narrative here is the one that has happened before we arrive. The sculpture, shaped and laid out through interaction by viewers, has been left in a state in which the weaving between and the interaction follows an anonymously laid out pathway. People have moved the sculptures and have been engaged with it publicly before our guide arrives. It intrigues and suggests that the response to such a random act may be precisely planned to counterbalance the random nature of the beginning.
Akiko’s dance, a movement piece that builds slowly towards a crescendo is both considered and clearly of such a high standard that it would be churlish to make comment; needless to say it is inventive, playful and exceptionally well executed. The problem that does exist in this very short piece is that the camera work does not follow it justly. It loses her at one point and then when she does travel it also gives us a section of her which spoils the overall effect; we see too much of a fragment and not enough of the whole.
Nevertheless, this creates thoughts and considered views that have made the piece very much a discussion in my head, thinking that has reshaped a view of where I may take myself today; though it shall not be in as shiny a foot as I witnessed here.
