Edinburgh Fringe 2025
NORMAL
71BODIES
Genre: Dance, Disability Arts, LGBTQ+, Movement, Multimedia
Venue: Assembly @ Dance Base
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
This is a Norwegian dance production by 71BODIES first performed in 2021 and making its Edinburgh Fringe debut. NORMAL is an interdisciplinary dance, storytelling, and film production. It explores themes of disability, sexuality, and gender identity, focusing on people and stories that exist outside mainstream society. The performance runs from July 31st to August 3rd, 2025.
Review
NORMAL is a production that centres on sustainable, care-filled performance and asks what it is to be in a non-conforming body (be that via disability, gender, sexuality, or race, with acknowledgement of their intersections). What we get is a performance by turns gentle and powerful. NORMAL’s magnificent final sequence about weight and effort follows early moments of lightness and fleeting freedom. Familiar movements are tweaked throughout: a duo dance together in a style with ballroom elements, except that they lead with their heads. Their foreheads press together, they will move apart but their heads and hands will always lead them back together. When they are done, one dancer is carefully guided to the sofa. Because, yes, this performance has a sofa on the stage. All the performers work their way towards it, they hold hands, pat each other’s bodies, one audio-describes for another in the background. They sit. Occasionally they sip water: simple demonstrations of care or needs-met have space on the stage in this production.
Running at Dance Base from the 31st of July to the 3rd of August, the show premiered in Bergen in 2021 and this was the company’s Edinburgh Fringe debut. Primarily dance, it also engages spoken word and film: a soft brown gauze background shows a wonderfully judged short film about living with disability as a child. Two performers speak their stories simply. About family, about acceptance, about decisions. The quiet declaration, ‘I am a hard worker’, lands with an oof in this political climate of precarious state support and suspicion of those requiring it. The final, intense, and physically gruelling dance conveys all of this “extra”, the sheer emotional weight of both the body experience and the societal one. The soundscape is well judged and at a subtly quieter volume than your average Fringe show. The lighting is thoughtful, the dancers are often picked out by a gentle spotlight as they begin.
71BODIES is a Norway-based dance company founded in 2018 by Daniel Mariblanca (who performs in two of three dance sequences here) with the intention of being transgender-inclusive. They explore ‘sensibilities around disability, sexuality, and gender’ (71BODIES). Mariblanca is a stunning performer in this piece. At one point his legs move like wheels and his body joins in the spin with his wheelchair-using partner, sharing easy levity. At another, he stomps onto steps, his partner balanced on his back. The cast of five do beautiful work and the collaboration in this production is evident – the lighting technician and production manager both join the cast on stage for a bow and a hug at the end.
As forms of performance, dance and circus often celebrate the edges one can push a body towards. Historically, what is only achieved by great effort is expected to look as smooth as possible. How then might dance look in the sustainable, inclusive form 71BODIES exists to create? NORMAL’s response is that non-conforming bodies rarely leave that edge. The edge is where they live. You can see it in their use of their hands – as care, as intimacy, as practical assistance – in feet that dangle or balance on other bodies, in the incorporation of jerking and shaking movements that appear within the choreography. And you see it in the confidence that displaying rest will not make for a less impressive performance. Alongside the drama of the shapes and striving, NORMAL makes space for the quiet power of someone sitting still for the length of the performance and declaring themselves ‘free-form’.
The final, entirely nude, sequence makes effort its theme. Two dancers move through continuous, intricate lifts – constantly changing forms whilst wrapping or hanging around each other’s bodies. Their sweat is rolled in as they find some relief on the floor. It is a powerful ending that builds continually without seeking false resolution. Their nudity is the only time the word normal actively comes to mind – their nakedness becomes normal and somewhat forgotten soon after you have recognised the importance of these bodies being seen entirely as they are.
See NORMAL for its truth and community, its depiction of effort made beautiful, and its success in using a performance space to show us what sustainable practice might look like.
