Dancing and Dueling in the Dark

A pair of dance trios are making big impressions but are doing so in very different ways and in very different places. And both have traveled a fair distance to strut their stuff in Scotland.

Gendai is a reminder that wildly fun surprises can show up in the most unexpected places during Edinburgh Fringe. This 15-minute Japanese laser light show is performed on a stage in Wu, a rather surreal Asian fusion restaurant in New Town. Restaurant patrons get to enjoy the performance as dinner entertainment; Fringegoers can come just for the show, but be advised that it’s best not to arrive hungry, as buffet tables with tasty-looking morsels are only a few feet away from the entertainment seating section.

Not that you’ll be easily distracted once the show begins. The perfect timing and precise choreography is a marvel to behold, and what the three dancers do with lasers beaming from the ceiling is nothing short of incredible. They bathe in their light, move them around, even grab them and use them as light sabers. It’s all super cool, or as the Japanese would say, totemo sugoi.

Also trendy is the hearty crew of New Zealand dancers from The Butterfly Who Flew Into the Rave, all three of whom are already dancing when the audience files in to the Main Hall at Summerhall. Every audience member is given a club wristband that also explains the show’s concept: We — the newly arrived butterflies — are about to witness a three-day rave condensed into an hour.

Not sure that concept fully plays as expected and cleverly conceived by Oli Mathiesen, but little matter: the show is an explosion of kinetic joy. Celia Hext, Lucy Lynch and Sharvon Mortimer rarely stop moving in sync for an hour as Suburban Giant’s Nocturbulous Behavior blasts through the venue. Their stamina is nothing short of impressive, and the choreography is as consistently interesting as it is relentless. But the hour-long length of this show gives one time to wonder if it would be possible to get, well, more from all this intense exertion? No individual narratives ever arrive, which is fine, but the dancing never builds either. If it did, the impact when the music and dancers finally stop might be all the stronger and memorable.