Fault Lines @ Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2024
Lîla Dance ensemble brings their near-future warning to life through intricate choreography, bounding athletics, a profoundly artistic use of space and design, and powerful emotion.
Alex Grunberg
This summer, August 2024 we had our first run at Edinburgh Fringe festival. Taking Fault Lines to Dance Base for a week run, it was both a wild and rewarding experience. If you’re not familiar with our show Fault Lines, the premise of the show is climate awareness - and this informed how we made the work (low carbon footprint) and how we are touring (reduced carbon emissions). So our journey to Edinburgh, with all our tech, props, costumes and basics for living, went in suitcases and on the train!
If you’ve been to Edinburgh during the festival you’ll know that flyering is a big thing - you will have so many shows thrust into your hands to draw you into the hundreds of shows running every day. For us we had to think about this carefully - we need to flyer but how to do this in a more sustainable way. So our mission was to engage people in conversation if they were interested offer them a flyer - no mass hand outs! This was challenging for us all but it was so lovely to actually hear about people’s passion for climate and for dance… our dancers and producer Lou, did a brilliant job on this! It’s quite a tough thing to do… lots of confidence needed and a lot of competition to catch people’s attention - we loved that one person just laid face-down on the floor, yelling up to people… certainly got people looking!
Our show went up at 3.50pm each day… scheduled between two dance shows Transhumanist by Danish company Next Zone, and Man and Board by artist Rob Heaslip. With a tight getting in and out time of 30 minutes we learnt how to be efficient in our tech, was quite a fun challenge once we’d got past the initial panic!!!
Dance Base 3 is a modern theatre space, surrounded by white concrete walls that created a stark, baron environment for Fault lines to exist in. This made the work feel even more dystopian than before. The digital projection and lighting design felt sharp and exposing, and the dancers responded to this through an embodiment of the brittle desperation and exhaustion. I’m sure by the last show this might have been less performance and more genuine tiredness!
The dancers move so beautifully; athletic and powerful performances, that still manage to capture personal fragility.
Audience response
Each day of our run we had good audience numbers and the feedback was both positive and moving. It’s always great to get a positive review from professional reviewers, but for me, speaking and hearing from the our audiences really motivates me to keep making work… although really elated to get a 5 star review!!!
This is a powerful and moving show, and the dancers do brilliantly to bring it to life.
Audience response
For me and Abi, it was a new experience to see a run of back-to-back performances of our work and watch it root down in a space - the dancers felt able to play with timing, spacing and relationships in a way that happens only when things are familiar. I felt the deeper messages in the work emerge more fully as the dancers could move much further beyond thinking and into feeling, sensation and vulnerability.
The immediacy of its metaphors and the emotions there within strike you from moment one.
Spy in the Stalls Horatio Holloway
Around our own show, we crammed in seeing 15 shows - all varied genres and approaches. Some were moving, some made us cry with laughter and others inspired us to rethink how we make work. It was a real buzz that feed us all artistically. If you get the chance to go, I’d recommend going for it… it really is an amazing experience.
Massive thanks to Assemby and Dance Base for supporting our time at the festival :)
