Produced by Dance Horizons and supported by Creative Scotland, this year’s Innovations at Edinburgh’s Studio Theatre assembled four compact works from Scotland, the Netherlands, and Spain, each with its own temperament...so writes Yuxi Jiang for theQR.co.uk
We begin with Current Accounts by Jessica Castellón & Boris Orihuela (Spain), which drops us into a dehumanised office terrarium. She sits stone-faced at a laptop, fingers ticking like a metronome of compliance; he loops in muttering “what the f*ck,” a glitch in the corporate matrix. Their duet speaks a striking movement dialect—bodies in soft collapse, perpetually off-balance, boneless yet hyper-controlled—as if gravity and H.R. had struck a deal.
Sudden, jump-cut bursts of feeling tip the room into a liminal state where their mutual care becomes substitution and overpowering. The dramaturgy is still fragmentary, but the motifs of burnout, disposability, and power land with bite. You sense a larger narrative waiting to be explored; this sketch already hums with potential—and leaves us complicit in the refrain: “what the f*ck?”
Their duet speaks a striking movement dialect—bodies in soft collapse, perpetually off-balance, boneless yet hyper-controlled—as if gravity and H.R. had struck a deal.
If ‘Current Accounts’ expresses the system from within…
In Endless Edge (chor. Jack Webb; danced by Catriona O’Connor and Melissa Heywood, Scotland) turns inward to anatomy and attention: two young performers tracing how a duet might breathe itself into being. The opening third sits in deliberate silence—no score, only breath—so each weight transfer is a clear punctuation mark in the room.
Webb keeps the choreographic marks visible, lines drawn/erased/redrawn as the pair test the edge between “everything and nothing,” yielding then insisting. Desire reads less as drama than as physics—reach, recoil, return. When sound finally arrives the field widens, but the arc doesn’t fully conclude: phrases land, then drift. The dancers are committed and capable, yet the work would benefit from a stronger engine or unique choreographic lexicon to carry its study of energy held, released, and re-threaded across time.
From abstraction to the domestic: Two People in a Room (2022), performed by Mariona Vinyes Ràfols and Filippo Gualandris, drifts in like a half-remembered morning. Everyday tasks leak into dance; speech flickers on and off; intimacy sits close yet oddly far. The duet traces a familiar arc—harmony to static, tug-of-war to fracture, then the tentative choreography of repair.
Partnering is the motor: near-miss passes, weight shared and snatched back, small gestures (braiding the hair, a forehead lean) that charge the air more than any big lift. Hints of Kaurismäki’s deadpan and Wong Kar-wai’s humid longing surface without turning into pastiche. Some loops linger a touch too long, but the performers’ understated alertness keeps the line taut. Built from the ordinary, it asks what remains when we stop narrating love and simply move around it.
From abstraction to the domestic: Two People in a Room (2022), performed by Mariona Vinyes Ràfols and Filippo Gualandris, drifts in like a half-remembered morning.
The evening closes with Joy—an extract from Dorine Mugisha’s dance-theatre work performed by Marie, Kiki, and Kemono—which wears its politics lightly by staging play. A triptych structure opens on a sibling vignette about Black hair: Marie’s humming folds us into a bright, mischievous domestic scene where grooming becomes kinship.
Beautiful violin melody blooms in part two; Krump, House, and Waacking ripple through the trio as emotion travels by pulse and groove. Finally, the stage becomes a playground—skipping ropes crack the air, rules loosen, and audience members are welcomed into the chase.
The piece carries cultural identity with ease rather than thesis: sisterhood/brotherhood, the everyday labour and pride of Black hair, and a resilient optimism that reads as both rebellion and hospitality. As an extract it’s a little episodic, but its offer is clear: joy as method, community as choreography.
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