Articles by Alex Reeves

Duck, Death and the Tulip

Review
★★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
Summerhall
31st Aug, 2014

Duck lives a typical duck existence: she eats snails, swims in ponds and sleeps peacefully at night. Death does not understand why the tulip that just sprang out of the earth shrivels at its touch, and it seems like it could do with some company...

Missing by David Bolger

Review
★★★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
Dance Base
26th Aug, 2014

What happens to the thousands of people who go missing every year? And what happens to the people left behind? How can anyone accept they might never know what happened to their loved ones, how does anyone deal with the disappearance of a parent, a child, a sibling, a friend?These are the questions at the core of Missing, a ‘dance poem’ by Irish company CoisCéim Dance Theatre...

Under the Erl Tree

This show by young company Turn the Key adapts the Nordic legend of the Erl King through movement, live music and puppetry. The all female cast create a slightly messy but lovely show, and while there’s one too many custom changes, and occasionally some over-acting, Under the Erl Tree is a show for young children, and there is nothing not to like about it...

Paper Rain

Paper Rain by Youth Theatre Georgia is one of those Fringe gems that one can only be glad to discover. Bringing back old-school clowning, the show presents a number of tragic-comic vignettes about love, what shapes it can take and between whom...

SPIN

Review
★★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
Zoo Southside
24th Aug, 2014

This show by Wales-based company Harnisch-Lacey Dance’s show mixes contemporary dance with breakdancing and elements of parkour. The premise is exciting – who doesn’t like a bit of parkour? And the revealing of two ramps on stage as the lights go up creates rather high expectations...

The Reluctant Dragon

Based on a short story by children’s author Kenneth Grahame, The Reluctant Dragon re-tells the legend of Saint George and his battle against the dragon. In this version, the dragon is a good dragon, who makes an agreement with Saint George to stage their fight so as to placate the villagers’ mounting concerns...

Decomposed! My Brother's Turning into a Zombie

Pompous orchestra conductor Will finds himself locked out of his house by his wife. He takes shelter, by accident, in his twin brother Igor’s bedroom. The two haven’t seen each other in ten years, and smelly, farting, video-games obsessed Igor is very close indeed to turning into a zombie...

Maria Addolorata

Review
★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
Summerhall
22nd Aug, 2014

At the beginning of Maria Addolorata, a man and a woman in caricature-like costumes sob uncontrollably and blow their noses. As they literally fall out of their outfits like shelled nuts, they set up the comedic tone of the next part of the show...

Portrait Femme Unveiled

Tackling a subject such as ‘the inner landscape of female identity’ is risky – the area is broad and the mission statement itself very vague. Yet, Portrait: Femme Unveiled, starts promisingly...

La Loba

Review
★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
Zoo Southside
21st Aug, 2014

La Loba is a mythological woman who wanders the Earth collecting animal bones, bringing dead creatures back to life with her singing, and occasionally laughing at humans. This dance piece by the Czech Lenka Vagnerová & Company dramatises the existence of La Loba and her encounter with a mortal woman...

Homme | Animal

‘I’m blind, living in the dark. Darkness is my education’ – so Juilliard-trained dancer and choreographer Vendetta Mathea opens Homme | Animal. She utters these words with her eyes closed, and proceeds to execute a mesmerising solo before leaving the stage to the three-dancer ensemble that takes the stage for the following hour...

Looking for Paul - Wunderbaum

Review
★★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
Summerhall
21st Aug, 2014

Some shows take the audience on challenging yet rewarding journeys through layers of meaning, interpretations, and staging. Looking for Paul is one of those shows, but in this case the journey is more like a trip on acid, at the end of which it would be an understatement to say that the audience is left puzzled...

The Waste Land Sisters

Review
★★
Edinburgh Fringe
Summerhall
20th Aug, 2014

The Waste Land Sisters fuses Chekhov’s The Three Sisters with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – two of the most beloved and meaningful pieces of literature of the twentieth century...

Chaucer: Hold Up Your Tale

Review
★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
19th Aug, 2013

In this musical adaptation of the Canterbury Tales, a family go on a pilgrimage with Father Geoffrey in order to restore their unity after months of tiresome quarrelling. On their journey, they tell, sing and enact four of Chaucer’s tales about the importance of family ties, at last learning a lesson about forgiveness and understanding...

What Is the Weight of Your Desire

Review
★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
14th Aug, 2013

The beginning of What Is the Weight Of Your Desire?, by Czech company VerTe Dance, makes it clear to the audience that they’re walking into a rather typically odd fringe show. Each member of the audience is asked to step on a scale under the vigilant gaze of one of the performers and as the spectators sit down they’re asked to push onto the scales so that the performer can see not only how heavy they are, but also how strong...

Operation: Love Story

Review
★★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
13th Aug, 2013

Jessica (whose name isn’t actually Jessica but people at work have been calling her that too long to be corrected) has a theory about love. She believes that everyone has a person out there waiting for them, waiting to be reunited with their soul’s other half, as Aristotle put it...

Habitat

Review
★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
12th Aug, 2013

A H Dance Company’s Habitat is a short but sweet multi-media work that blends contemporary and modern dance, projections and voice-overs to explore the relationship between identity and our surrounding environment...

The Mid-Knight Cowboy

Review
★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
7th Aug, 2013

As a child, William/Billy plays Cowboys and Indians, takes great pride in his cowboy hat, and wants to grow up to become a cowboy like John Wayne, partly because his father nicknames him ‘the midnight cowboy’...

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