Edinburgh Fringe 2025
A Journey of Flight
Kathryn Gordon
Genre: Dance, Multimedia, Music
Venue: Assembly @ Dance Base
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
An immersive 50 minute dance performance created in Shetland and inspired by the migration of birds. With live music from Jenny Sturgeon and projected visuals, A Journey of Flight creates a journey of arrivals, departures, the nostalgia of place and the notion of flight itself. Set against a backdrop of white sheets, the dancers move through ever changing spaces, exploring new states of being and new homes. It invites audiences to reflect on the delicate balance between nature, movement and our emotional ties to place. MadeInScotlandShowcase.com
Review
Soft, white textures greet you as you enter Dance Base’s studio for Kathryn Gordon: A Journey Of Flight and take your seat in the round. The stage is dotted with paper aeroplanes. The two dancers are folding more of them, dressed in baggy linens – ideal for travel, colours that feel right for Shetland (its own place of origin) – and for creating bird shapes, for hiding in and emerging from later on the performance. There isn’t yet music, we orientate to the space and the simple actions in silence, like preparation for a journey. Long trails of white gauze hang around the centre, creating an edge for the dancers to circle around and multiple strips of surface for projectors to light.
The white sheets display birds, trees, weather-like shapes, thatched roofs and houses, and signal another permutation of change, nature, or travel. Live music from multi-instrumentalist Jenny Sturgeon also does this marvellously – the soundscape uses wordless vocals, bird song, and field recordings along with more ethereal sonic sounds, strings, and beats. The dancers (Kathryn Gordon and Jorja Follina) are frequently near the ground, reaching, folding, striving, constantly moving in exquisite shapes that are both human and non-human. Often by themselves but in tandem and connection with one another, they make their way around the stage with increasing physicality. The moments the dancers come together, hands and fingers linked and extended like wings or bodies curling together, connect beautifully- they move in and out of each other’s physical space with ease and show some of the relief offered by the near presence of another. Gordon, Follina, and Sturgeon introduce heavier, breathier themes – journeys are tiring, nature is relentless, and the dancers impressively keep going, keep moving faster, at times smiling through their depiction of this universal effort.
Words about home break through at the end, and Sturgeon sings lyrics ‘take me home’. We are here. I understand the build-up, using words to release the effort of the journey and bring us home but I would be interested to see a way of incorporating spoken-word earlier in the performance. Likewise, themes of a pause and lightness before a long journey are thoughtfully represented by a slow beginning that feels perhaps a touch too slow. The motif of throwing paper aeroplanes to begin is strikingly calm and playful but it is a lot for only two dancers to carry for the time spent on it. There is a fabulous return to the paper aeroplanes at the end, almost an addendum – the lights go down at the end of the dancing and then come back to pick the paper up again – and it is a gorgeous bookend, reinforcing the theme of circularity. It also produces a simultaneous release of activity and laughter from the audience – a truly lovely sound after the hardworking breaths of the dancer and bird chirrups of the sound design. We are sent off with an action, an invitation to pause, and an out-breath.
It’s the kind of show that easily sparks discussion afterwards. My group talks about the shapes and the vocals, we all remember the parts where the dancers met and moved together. We also share experiences of home and travel – how long it takes to settle, which places we belong to, and how we got there. This is always-engaging dance that captures travel and nature in its anticipation, exhaustion, and constant change, and yet is never other than refreshing to watch.
