Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Deiseil: Dancing in Time
Alison Carlyle and Amy Geddes
Genre: Dance
Venue: the Space at Venue 45
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
This is a celebration of and art form – stepdance – as it returns to the fold of dance in Scotland. It is a ceilidh performance, in the wonderful tradition of Scottish theatre, drawing people up on stage to perform because there were dancers in the room.
Review
People in charge of Highland dancing decided to ban step dance. Removing the dance steps from their competitions, removed the practice and disassociated it from the culture it celebrated. Here we have two practitioners, friends, who have resurrected a lively form of dance that should never have been lost. With the Cape Breton fiddle underneath, it percussively keeps the beat and rhythm of a collective heritage.
Here, Carlyle and Geddes have reopened this beautiful form of artistic expression, vibrant, expressive and filled with joy. Scotland is a country much steeped in its own traditions, however often it requires people outside of our country to remind us of those traditions. Step dance is an example of how it was lost and the effect it had because, as director Gerry Mulgrew’s tones keep telling us, that they lost the steps and therefore lost their rhythm.
The connection explored here is not just to dance but also to the Gaelic. It is also important that we remind ourselves that the Cape Breton fiddle music that we hear kept this Scottish artform alive on the east coast of Canada whilst we were doing our damned best to get rid of it. That is an uncomfortable learning curve.
It is a comfort that not that Carlyle and Geddes found each other, but their experiences, slightly different in childhood, have found a collaborative opportunity to bring their joint passion to play and make our amends – the fiddle and the feet are back and back with dignity.
Performances are exceptional. The fiddle playing and dancing, and fiddle playing at the same time as dancing, reconnects us with tradition but more. The section where dances were compared in steps, the reading and physical exploration of stepdance dance steps were part of the educational pitch to legitimise the steps. Bringing people onstage to dance alongside then brought that to a celebratory climax.
Director, Gerry Mulgrew manages to create the metier in which this thrives. It is simple without being overly simplistic. So, when we see the washing being put out and on that on those towels and the various garments that are put up, including the socks, seem to be pictures of a time when song was used to help mend nets, make textiles or gut the fish that connection was well made.
Deiseil is Gaelic for ready, and I have to say that at the end of the show this I was more than Deiseil for what will come next. More so than when I arrived! Attempting to sound very smart on my way in I mispronounced the Gaelic name to the English person collecting the tickets. They were calling out for tickets for Dancing in Time. I was reminded very quickly as I sat my backside down that I had a lot to learn about my own culture and this was part of that journey.
This is a brilliant piece of creative art that deserves to go to the far corners of Scotland not just where Highland dancing happens but within the legs and feet of the local community but to places where Highland dancing is seen as an inferior art form. To other forms of dancing, we need to celebrate who we are what we are but also importantly what we came from and that Cape Breton fiddle is as much a part of our DNA as any other form of Highland dancing.
