Next up is the second of our two dance productions at this year’s fringe, and it’s one of a group of five shows under the heading Taiwan Season. It’s Taiwan Season: Together Alone at Dance Base (Studio 1), at 21:45 on Tuesday 22nd. Here’s the blurb: “’Together Alone talks a lot about how to live together. We tasked ourselves to never let go of each other. That creates huge limitations. It’s just the two of us, but what we experience parallels society: how we deal with people, how we use each other, how we collaborate. Sometimes we help each other, sometimes we are against each other, sometimes we need to negotiate. The relationship is always changing. It has difficulties, it has moments of being smooth, it will change again, but nothing lasts forever’ (Chen-Wei Lee).”

This is one of those brave productions where the performers, Chen Wei and Vakulya Zoltan, are naked on stage throughout. There’s no hiding place with such a show, so I’m expecting it to be very moving and almost brutally honest. Check back around 10.45 pm to see how effective it was. By then the next preview blog should be available to read too.

There’s no doubting that Chen Wei and Vakulya are fantastic dancers and this routine covers many varied moods, not only in dance but in emotions and in the music. There’s a lively sequence when they throw themselves into a big band number and their nudity looks particularly strange – and memorable – against this incongruous musical background. The lighting also plays a very important role in explaining the movements and the contours of the dancers’ bodies. Very effective, very honest and very good indeed.