TELL ME ANYTHING // David Ralfe

Tell Me Anything delivers a refreshing and profound take on the enduring discourse surrounding mental illness. The narrative focuses on performer David Ralfe and flashes back to his relationship with Kate, his girlfriend at 15 years old. Diagnosed as atypically anorexic, Kate is physically absent from the story, as we are led to believe she, and many like her, try to become physically absent from reality, by starving themselves. As 'Thinspiration' becomes a pre-pubescent lifestyle choice it’s impossible to avoid this epidemic of female self-harm. Watching the recent Netflix phenomena Stranger Things, it seemed terrifyingly unsurprising there is a Proana discussion devoted to the unnaturally thin Natalia Dyer.

David is tormented by Kate’s illness and its profound effect on their relationship. With a Dolphin strapped to his back he recites the mantra Warmth, Guidance, Gentle Nudging as a coping strategy to help him thought the lies and vomit scented snogging. Young love beset by constant struggle ultimately takes its toll on David and our honest and reliable narrator reveals his present mental health struggles.

Kate's parents are uninterested and like Joan Bakewell’s recent controversial and unhelpful statement, infer that anorexia is fundamentally narcissism. This leaves the burden of support on an increasingly unstable David: we feel his instability as he physically stumbles through a small collection of cardboard tubes. He grasps at them as they fall over and he tries to fix them, just like he is trying to fix Kate, to save her from herself.

NHS Mental Health funding is bound to suffer no matter what was written on the Brexit battle bus, there are no quick solutions to the rise of the mental health crisis brought on by years of austerity but Tell Me Anything manages to engage the audience with determination and commitment.

- Lucy Orr

Tell Me Anything is on at 17.45 at Summerhall (Venue 26) until August 28th. See venue for Accessibility information, Suitability: 14+ (Guideline). https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/tell-me-anything 

NHS mental health funding is still lagging behind, says report: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/09/nhs-mental-health-funding-is-still-lagging-behind-says-report

My Battle With Anorexia | Dave Chawner | TEDxClapham: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqbL-UhhyPk

Eating Disorders from the Inside Out: Laura Hill at TEDxColumbus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEysOExcwrE

Ruby Wax:What's so funny about mental illness?: https://www.ted.com/talks/ruby_wax_what_s_so_funny_about_mental_illness

(I COULD GO ON SINGING) SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW // FK Alexander

The volume of this work is at the level of trembling clothes. An affective noise that moves bodies and governs the internal rhythms of an audience to match its ritual of dialogue balladry. The singer is standing in a washed-out strobe aurora with a mic lead coiled in her punk rock grip, hand-in-hand with one from the crowd. The crowd let it lull them into a meditative state.

Noise is often a subtle charming of our unconscious reactions, whether the drip-drip of an irritating tap or the hollow roar of a train-journey tunnel. It holds and releases insides and surface, quivering and dimpling and pushing you back, fading into the background with time but rearranging you as you stand. It bathes and heals and envelops your stresses, leeching it back through vibrations that heal. FK Alexander enters into eye-contracts of healing interaction flanked by the two noisy sentinels of her co-performers. For an hour after entering you stand, sit or shuffle in the space at the limit of aural endurance, until leaving into the shocking quiet. It’s sound as a weapon targeting isolation, and sound as a healing force, bridging bodies in the room.

The work is a cover version of a performance moment, a reinterpretation of a numbingly repeated song to convey the hurt and poignance of the final performance of an aging star. Clattering drums and odd discordance augment the familiar Hollywood build to a transcendent moment of cathartic release. The formality of dressing, undressing, and holding hands acts out a serenade as an engagement. When Judy Garland died of an overdose of barbiturates in 1969 it was an overstimulation to the point of limit. The noise here is an overstimulation, but one that heals as much as that other destroyed. (LC)

(I Could Go On Singing) Over The Rainbow ran at Summerhall Basement until August 28th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/i-could-go-on-singing-over-the-rainbow

FK Alexander: https://www.artsadmin.co.uk/artists/fk-alexander

A History of Using Sound as a Weapon: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-history-of-using-sound-as-a-weapon

Sound Healing: http://qz.com/595315/turns-out-sound-healing-can-be-actually-well-healing/

Come On, Feel the Noise (Paul Hegarty): https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/nov/10/squarepusher-paul-hegarty-noise

Clip of Judy Garland’s Final Television Performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJhHPTBjzac

The Second Summer of Hate: Noise Rock Now (The Quietus): http://thequietus.com/articles/19966-noise-rock-2016-reviews

Okishima Island Tourist Association Shoot: http://www.kovoroxsound.com/OKISHIMA%20ISLAND%20TOURIST%20ASSOCIATION%20-%20SHOOT.html

I AM NOT A CHILD // Dale vN Marshall

As the wall text of this exhibition acknowledges, the graffiti practiced on the streets of Bath and Bristol by Dale vN Marshall preceded his sectioning in the Cornwall County Asylum in 1999, but the event exerts a continuing resonance on his practice of art. His spray-paint work on the walls of public spaces transferred to private galleries and international museums as a gallery artist, but maintains its still-street aesthetic. In this exhibition at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, Marshall has drawn on his own experiences as a young person in the mental health system to produce the paintings, as well as on a series of conversations and workshops with young people in Edinburgh dealing with ADHD, autism and circumstantial trauma facilitated by drama programs and community organisations. 

These young people face immense difficulties just being young now, as the social contract of ever increasing living standards promised by previous generations frays around the edges. Diagnoses of mental ill health amongst young people have skyrocketed, and when one in ten young people between five and sixteen years are struggling, it is worth acknowledging that it might also be due to the pressures of life that impinge on their development. The world intrudes on the stability of those starting to establish themselves. These dense bands of highlighter colours that drip and trail from the canvases on display in Marshall’s work include harshly scrawled statements of neglect and despair from his young workshop participants. “I’m sick of people telling me who I am and who I should be” and “Give us a voice and we will be heard” bracket the abstract shapes and colour fields. Parental pressures, support, work and education deficiencies, digital expectation and the pressures of neoliberalism on families mount up to a difficult-at-best process of learning to live. Through working with artists, and becoming artists themselves, young people have a space for expression and engagement separate from the social imperative not to learn what is not directly applicable to later life. Street art is an intervention into public space, just as art can be an intervention into the development of good mental health.

- Lewis Church

The Acting Scene (Edinburgh based Drama Company) – http://theactingscene.co.uk/

Mental Health Statistics (Young Minds) - http://www.youngminds.org.uk/training_services/policy/mental_health_statistics
 
Supporting Young People’s Health and Wellbeing (Scottish Government Policy Summary) –
http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0041/00418332.pdf
 
Street Art News - https://streetartnews.net
 
Dale vN Marshall Q&A – http://www.tracscotland.org/scottish-storytelling-centre/news/qa-dale-vn-marshall

FAT GIRLS DON'T DANCE // Maria Ferguson

There's some crunk dance moves happening in Maria Ferguson’s first one woman show, Fat Girls Don’t Dance, it’s an autobiographical account of her struggles with food and body image and how this has affected her dreams of becoming a professional dancer.

Stuck in a job cold calling for Which magazine Maria is day dreaming of supplying the dance floor with some sick moves. She sings "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid as if a plea for inclusion to the world of performance.

There’s more sick moves when Maria gets home but these involve vomit, as the audience witnesses her battling with her eating disorder, obsessive exercise and calorie counting. Like every thinspiration instagram post she contorts till her collar bones protrude and runs desperately as if searching for that ever elusive thigh gap, her brows knit with determination or maybe confusion as the Meghan Trainor song "All About the Bass" resounds across the stage, a positive body image and self-acceptance anthem which entreats her to embrace herself at any size.

A beloved but expensive dance class involves tap, ballet and modern but also French Fancies, Custard Creams and wotsits. Through repetition and Tourettes-like physical tics, Maria describes her auditions, which are always met with a mantra of “too fat to play pretty, too pretty to play fat.” Maria is caught in a mental and physical loop of auditions for the indistinguishable female performer’s holy trinity of Holby City, Casualty, Eastenders.

Culture Club's "Karma Chameleon" is Maria’s Bulimia musical touchstone, a song to be sung so she recognises dangerous behaviors, but also to comfort shattered dreams and the painful daily realities and challenges of bingeing and purging.

When even record breaking Olympian Simone Biles suffers body shaming, the challenges of maintaining a positive body image seem insurmountable to most women. Fat Girls Don’t Dance is a touching, brave and at times uncomfortably honest performance that entreats the audience to challenges the impossible aesthetic of professional dancers.

- Lucy Orr

Fat Girls Don’t Dance is on at 14.50 at Underbelly, Cowgate (Venue 61) Hearing Loop. https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/fat-girls-don-t-dance

Stripping away negative body image | Lillian Bustle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME-c0l8oTkY

Proof That You Can Be A Wildly Talented Dancer At Any Size http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/05/fat-girl-dancing-video-talk-dirty-to-me_n_4730408.html

Girls with anorexia turned away by NHS because they are 'not thin enough' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/03/girls-with-anorexia-turned-away-by-nhs-because-not-thin-enough/

A resource for professionals and carers of people with eating disorders http://www.thenewmaudsleyapproach.co.uk/

1 LAST DANCE WITH MY FATHER // Njambi McGrath

It's not just African AIDS statistics that Njambi McGrath carries around with her; she bears the generational physical and mental scars of Kenya’s colonial past. Teresa Mays recent political wrangling to scrape The Human Rights Act seem unsurprising when Njambi offers an African’s insight into the systematic extermination of the populations of Kenya and DRC by European Imperialists. It's the West's inability to see the hypocrisy in lecturing Africa Nations on human rights that has recently led to Gambia withdrawing from The Commonwealth.

Njambi manages to cover a diverse and vast range of topics during her hour on stage including The Wealth Divide, Donald Trump’s seemingly imminent Mexican wall, Oscar Pretorius and Guantanamo Bay. But all these topics are used as humorous asides to her starling account of surviving her father’s emotional and physical abuse. Njambi makes light of his regular brutalities as she strays from current events into autobiographical territory. She stresses her father was surely a feminist as he maintained all females should obtain a good education but then describes how he beat her to unconsciousness after learning she had an abortion.

1 Last Dance with My father is a story of survival, on first impression Njambi’s survival of her father, but as the narrative progresses we learn that Njambi’s father was an orphan of a Kenyan resettlement camp, found suckling the teat of his dead mother. His death begins a journey of understanding and forgiveness, a personal parallel to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Njambi challenges our perceptions of Africa and its people while maintaining a western discourse on current political events such as The Brexit and even manages to get a gasp from the audience on suggesting that Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai is probably a cunt.

- Lucy Orr

1 Last Dance with My father is on at 14.30 at Laughing Horse @ Espionage (Venue 185) until August 27th. Wheelchair Accessible Toilets.https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/1-last-dance-with-my-father

Mau Mau uprising: Kenyans still waiting for justice join class action over Britain's role in the emergency -Thousands of elderly people claim mistreatment, rape and torture by colonial forces http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/mau-mau-uprising-kenyans-still-waiting-for-justice-join-class-action-over-britains-role-in-the-9877808.html

Domestic violence is biggest threat to west Africa's women, IRC says https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2012/may/22/domestic-violence-west-africa-irc

Leslie Dodson: Don’t misrepresent Africa https://www.ted.com/talks/leslie_dodson_don_t_misrepresent_africa

4D CINEMA // Mamoru Iriguchi

Mamoru Iriguchi’s moving planes of flat projection are a visual signature, a recurring technique constructed through a wacky series of contraptions that disguise their sophistication. In 4D Cinema the footage projected onto them are used to question time itself, the ability of a subject to define their own home and the biographic responsibilities of the performer and audience. The nature of memory is as much its subject as Marlene Dietrich, both in what the audience remember of themselves as they were fifty minutes younger, and in thoughts of how your memory will survive after death.

It is apt that this questioning of memory happens through a screen. There is constant media speculation on the consequences of modern humanity’s deferral of the responsibility of remembering onto external devices. No longer do our brains contain sets of memorised phone numbers or addresses, they're filed away as discrete pieces of digital information accessed through a screen or a cloud. Iriguchi’s work highlights the risk that this trust of the screen might come to dominate our own memories. Believable biographical material is delivered through screen and authoritative speech, causing a brief cognitive dissonance with my vaguely recalled pop cultural history. Was what was said about Dietrich true, whether played forwards or back? Can I trust my disbelief without a surreptitious Google?

As the performance finishes, the last thing the audience see is themselves reversed in moving image, a playback of themselves entering unaware into the space. It’s a riff on self-perception and its communication, on the marketing of ourselves as a central concern, the modus operandi of social media and advertising, subcultures, clothing and rep. Like the mirror stage of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the point at which a toddler locates themselves in the image in the mirror, video documentation shows the subject to itself as something others see. In 4D Cinema our image is reflected back to a later version of ourselves, through an unaware entrance, and the ramblings of a reticent historical subject.

- LC

Mamoru Iriguchi - http://www.iriguchi.co.uk/About.html

How the Internet Inhibits Short-Term Memory -http://www.medicaldaily.com/information-overload-how-internet-inhibits-short-term-memory-257580

Digital Amnesia: Real or Not? -http://www.techtimes.com/articles/65431/20150709/digital-amnesia-spreading-due-to-internet-and-smartphone-use-or-crass-marketing-ploy.htm

Metaperceptions: How Do You See Yourself? -https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200505/metaperceptions-how-do-you-see-yourself

The Mirror Stage –http://www.lacanonline.com/index/2010/09/what-does-lacan-say-about-the-mirror-stage-part-i/

Mamoru Iriguchi/Lewis Church Interview (Exeunt) - http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/between-the-genres/

DIARY OF A MADMAN // Gate Theatre

Adapted from Nikolai Gogol’s short story of the same name, Al Smith re-sets Diary of A Madman in contemporary Scotland. The main protagonist, Pop Sheeran makes his living from the inherited trade of restoring Forth Rail Bridge. It takes him a whole year to complete the repainting, by which time he is ready to start over again. 

Sheeran is proud of this family heritage, which he is keen to see continue, as we understand his eldest son, Henry, used to work with his father. Henry is not physically present at any moment in the play, we know early on that he is “unwell”. 

Filling in for Henry in his absence is new recruit Matt White (sic), a research student in material sciences, sent by the University of Edinburgh to test a new kind of paint, designed to last over 50 years. As Matt and Pop’s daughter Sophie start to develop romantic interests in each other, a conversation between White and Sheeran begins to shed light on Henry’s absence.

Sheeran refers to an unnamed hereditary condition for which his son is hospitalised, and tells White that his own condition is managed with medication. 

The play’s pace accelerates proportionally to Sheeran’s “descent into madness” as he fears White’s feelings for his daughter will make the newcomer the “man of the house” and that the buying of the bridge by a Qatari company was in fact engineered by the young Englishman, marking the beginning of a new conflict between the two countries.

Not yet clearly diagnosed, Sheeran’s conversations and developing relationship with a soft toy puppet of Greyfriar’s puppy, as well as his increased obsession with his relationship to William Wallace, suggests that he may have been living with a form of schizophrenia. Sheeran ends the play (before his hospitalisation), being Wallace himself, also pointing to the literary rich Histrionic Personality Disorder. 

Beyond the piece’s staging of madness, and the possible triggers to moments of crisis, Haydon’s take on Smith’s play clearly points to how socioeconomic background affects our experiences of mental ill-health. For the Sheeran family, this hereditary ill health is tangled in nationalism, class and their role on the global market.

- Leo Burtin

Diary of a Madman is on at the Traverse Theatre at various times until August 28th. Wheelchair Access, Level Access - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/diary-of-a-madman-1 

Free (public domain) Diary of A Madman by Gogol: http://www.feedbooks.com/book/6464/diary-of-a-madman

University of Cambridge research article exploring the relationship between social class, mental health stigma and mental health literacy: http://hea.sagepub.com/content/19/4/413

American Public Health Journal article on unemployment and mental health: http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.94.1.82

American Psychological Association article on Histrionic Personality Disorder: http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2007-00410-008

HERO WORSHIP // Sonic Boom

Hero Worship deals with comics as a coping mechanism and is the latest in a series of monologues by admired writer-performer Kenny Boyle. Cyberpunk clothing and a utility belt are instantly familiar from the comic Kick Ass as is our hero, a 21st century everyman working in a SUPERmarket. His main enemies are probably familiar to all of us and go by the names of anxiety, depression and uncertainty.  Using imagination to escape the mundane is a central theme in hero Worship but it’s stressed, that the complexities of real life are what make us who we are and build our personalities. Boyle reiterates though out the performance that it’s everyday moral choices such as caring for an animal or falling in love that make us truly powerful. 

Just like Batman and Superman our hero is an orphan and troubled by childhood loss. By becoming The Flash he suggests his imagination lets him run so fast, that death and pain become insignificant. Boyle uses spoken word filled with rhyming references to a vast comic universe to transcend reality, but this doesn’t stop him bringing us violently down to earth with a powerful description of a physical attack.

During the performance Boyle points to members of the audience and assigns them powers: these aren’t telekinesis or invisibility, but empathy and commonsense. Hero Worship consistently asserts that men in tights and robot fights can do wonders to bolster self-confidence and self-awareness.

Comics preserve the tradition of visual storytelling vital to humanity. More recently, they have become a literary platform that pushes traditional narrative boundaries by addressing a whole spectrum of physical and mental health issues, ranging from body shaming and feminism to LGBT rights. These days graphic novels have a lot to say. At the end of the performance when our hero is unmasked and the therapy is complete. He has escaped the escapism and been assured by his new found love that she didn’t need saving; just for him to be there, a partner in life’s daily fight.

To be continued…(LO)

Hero Worship is on at 13.30 at C venues – C (Venue 34) until August 29th. Wheelchair Access, Level Access -https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/hero-worship

 Welcome to Bitch Planet - the comic that's reimagining feminism: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/06/bitch-planet-comic-feminism

The Rise of Superhero Therapy - Comic Books as Psychological Treatment: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/17/the-rise-of-superhero-therapy-comic-books-as-psychological-treatment.html

The effect of comic books on the ideology of children: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/ort/11/3/540/

The visual magic of comics - Scott McCloud: https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_mccloud_on_comics?language=en

DOLLY WANTS TO DIE // Lung

Playtime is over, and now that they’re on their own Dolly and Mister Bear can get back to their foul-mouthed ranting, drug-taking, suicide-attempting day. Dolly wants to die, and she is quite clear about that.

Over the 45 minutes of the piece, we look on as Dolly attempts on her own life in ways which range from immolation to asking an audience member to smash her china head with a gigantic (on the scale of a doll) dildo. Helen Monks’ (Dolly) performance of the character’s more or less surreal suicide attempts resonates with that of Maria de Meideros as Karenine Battavia in the 1996 film News From The Good Lord. 

Dolly Wants To Die doesn’t directly explore the contentious topic of assisted suicide - but rather the difficulties faced by Generation Y within a saturated job market, leading them to move back with family (and their childhood toys) as they are not able to find work at the end of their education. 

In both cases, that of the film and Dolly Wants to Die, the darkly comic repetition of the character’s failure to die points to questions of agency. While Dolly has been around for what she deems to be long enough, doesn’t have any internal organs and “no pension plan in sight”, she doesn’t find the help to die when and how she chooses.

Where medicalisation could be seen to promote longevity over quality of life, and in the austere contexts of cuts to disability allowances, our relationship to end-of-life choices is changing rapidly. Debates around assisted suicide ought to be nuanced, and opening up uncomfortable conversations around death and dying is a useful starting point to making considered decisions for ourselves and our loved ones.

- Leo Burtin

Dolly Wants To Die is on at 16.10 at Underbelly Cowgate until August 28th. Hearing Loop available - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/dolly-wants-to-die 

Internet Movie Database entry on News from the Good Lord: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116081/ 

Article on the medicalisation of dying: http://www.bmj.com/content/324/7342/905.1

Information about Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20696006-being-mortal 

Information on Liz Carr’s Assisted Suicide the Musical: http://notdeadyetuk.org/assisted-suicide-musical/ 

Guardian Article on cuts to disability benefits: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/29/employment-and-support-allowance-the-disability-benefit-cuts-you-have-not-heard-about

ZERO // Popcorn Productions

Zero by Popcorn Productions is about surviving trauma in the transitional period from teenage years to adulthood; it is also about consent and questions our ability to relate events in a linear, narrative form. 

The staging of the piece is minimal. One performer (Grace Vance as Beth), a stool, a cigarette and a lighter. Beth has stepped out of her own 21st birthday party to talk to us. 

It takes her a while to find her feet, to get comfortable with us listening to her story, to what she has to say. As she begins, she could be seen to be no different to any other twenty-something, confident woman. She’s embarrassed by her dad’s dancing and keeps an eye on her best friend as she makes out with he DJ. 

It soon becomes apparent that Beth has a lot more to tell us, and that perhaps she is finding the words as she goes. At its core, Zero is a disruption of familiar narratives of trauma - where a singular episode triggers a chain of events leading to a culminating point; in Beth’s case, an attempted suicide. This is not how it happened for Beth, and this is not how she tells the story.

Rachel Ruth Kelly’s script reveals relatively early on that Beth has experienced “severe suicidal ideation”. This is the first diagnosis Zero offers us, and as it unfolds we find out more about Beth, her survival of bulimia nervosa, her own and her family’s relationship to depression.

As the piece develops, we begin to piece together Beth’s allusions to past events and episodic storytelling in an attempt to bring clarity to her experience.

As well as the character’s complex relationship to her health, Zero explores Beth’s romantic relationship with a man, experiencing abuse, and illustrates the complexity of the ill-understood idea of “traumatic bonding”, which can lead abuse survivors to maintain or develop feelings for their abusers.

(LB)

ZERO is on at 13.00 at Underbelly Cowgate until August 28th. Hearing Loop available - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/zero 

An animated video on consent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQbei5JGiT8

Research on traumatic bonding: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/springer/vav/1993/00000008/00000002/art00002

STORIES TO TELL IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT // Francesca Millican-Slater

Francesca Millican-Slater's work tends to be autobiographical: Me, Myself and Miss Gibbs traced her journey across the UK in search of the recipient of an enigmatic postcard, while Forensics of a Flat unfolded the history of her peculiar home in Birmingham, a former office above a shop. The same is sort-of true of this show, but only in its starting point: as documented on the accompanying blog, she experiences chronic insomnia, and the stories she tells over the course of the hour are a reflection of the fantastical thoughts that plague her through the night.

Insomnia is a common problem – the NHS estimates that one in three people in the UK experience it regularly – and on the surface Millican-Slater's stories evoke the banal: one features a couple in a supermarket; another, a couple disturbed by the insistent loud music played by their neighbours after hours. A man in one story attempts to find friendship among his colleagues in a pork-pie factory; a man in another strikes up conversation with a cafe owner and a newspaper vendor on his early morning walks. However, each vignette quickly takes a Tales of the Unexpected detour towards the weird. The factory worker is demoted when he constructs a pastry penis; the street blares with noise as neighbours compete to play their own favoured style of music at the highest volume. The tone is more often kind than sinister, particularly in the tale of a mysterious matchmaker, a man who stalks people he knows to be single, then attempts to pair them up, functioning as an “analogue Tinder”.

Sleeplessness is a lonely and often furious place, and many of the characters in these stories are lonely and furious, too – particularly those already in couples. The overlap between insomnia and depression is suggested in an undercurrent hum of desire for meaning, or purpose, or connection, most audible in the story about the man who begins each day walking his neighbourhood, convinced that the world would fall apart if he didn't. The blue light that bathes Millican-Slater's face speaks of the computer screens that promise connection but only in isolation. Listening to her, the audience sit in isolation, too: joined together by her velveteen voice, spinning a web of strangeness.

(MC)

Stories To Tell in the Middle of the Night is on at 10.15 at Summerhall until August 28. See venue for accessibility information - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/stories-to-tell-in-the-middle-of-the-night

Basic insomnia facts: http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Insomnia/Pages/Introduction.aspx

On the relationship between insomnia, anxiety and depression: https://sleepfoundation.org/insomnia/content/what-causes-insomnia

On the cultural rise of lack of sleep: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/wellbeing/10304984/Is-there-any-way-to-cure-insomnia.html

On mindfulness as a cure for insomnia: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/09/sleep-how-to-beat-insomnia

The blog accompanying the show: http://www.storiestotellinthemiddleofthenight.com/

HIP // Kriya Arts

Hip is an hour drifting through the Jungian collective unconsciousness; during the performance, Jolie Booth explores the serendipity of finding uncanny parallels with past lives. Based around found objects, Hip is a semi-autobiographical one woman show that starts by introducing us to a location caught between two timelines and personalities: the home of Anne Clarke during 60s bohemian Brighton, and a squat established by Jolie in 2002.

In homage to Aboriginal songlines which suggests location designates family, the audience is transported, in this extra live performance, to a cosy living room with cushions and cheese and pineapple nibbles. Acting as an aid to suspend disbelief, these props along with real love letters and transparencies of Annie’s eccentrically erotic art, are accompanied by Jolie’s soothing and passionate storytelling.

The title Hip comes from a Hip bone found amongst Annie’s possessions, eludes to a posthumous physical memory and is used to initiate a séance, in which the audience hold hands to connect with the presence of Annie. No longer spectators, they are now a tribe connected and enthralled by the memories of Jolie and Annie. Maffesoli (1996) describes tribes as a collective form of identity which is based on sentiment rather than rationality.

The hypnotic environment of light from an overhead projector used to display letters and poems from lovers and friends of Annie these are interwoven with vestiges from Jolie’s own life and there is an immediate and clear association. In later life Annie was consumed by alcoholism and died alone estranged from her family but Jolie suggests her funeral was well attended, if only by the patrons of her local drinking establishment. At the end of the play, Jolie explains that the hip bone isn’t human and is surely a memento from the Occult bookshop where she worked and frequented: just one of the glimpses into the community of 60s bohemian Brighton.

In respect for the dead, before we leave we join Jolie in a toast (with free tequila shots) to Annie’s life. This closes the circle of memory, love and loss. In a somnambulistic trance the audience leaves; Jolie has provided an authentic and human exploration of inherently unstable modern tribalism.

(LO)

Hip is on at 16.30 at ZOO (Venue 124) ntil August 27th. Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets, Relaxed Performance - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/hip

E15-mothers: https://en.squat.net/tag/e15-mothers/

Advisory Service for Squatters: http://www.squatter.org.uk/for-new-squatters/squatting-made-less-simple/

The lethality of loneliness - John Cacioppo at TEDxDesMoines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0hxl03JoA0

One-woman show Hip charting the times of Anne Clarke, who helped set up Infinity Foods: http://www.theargus.co.uk/leisure/stage/14483157.One_woman_show_Hip_charting_the_times_of_Anne_Clarke__who_helped_set_up_Infinity_Foods/

Dissecting and Detecting Stories in Found Objects and Remnants: http://hyperallergic.com/223735/dissecting-and-detecting-stories-in-found-objects-and-remnants/

What are song lines?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVOG-RKTFIo

PUSSYFOOTING // Knotworks

Five self-identified non-men interrogate the tropes of womanhood, the limits and pressures of gender and the political ramifications of their bodies, built from a research process of interviews and workshops. Pussyfooting rehearses the core concerns of contemporary feminism, of the positions taken and opinions thrown on University campuses, internet message boards and in the corner boxes of broadsheets who should do better. It smartly favours autobiography, keeping the focus on the lives of the performers and their peers, a policy that sacrifices some intersectional awareness in favour of personal authenticity. The piece questions the expectations of family and schoolmates, highlights the difficulty and necessity of gender assertion and enjoys the community found amongst university peers through the first steps of the development of an artistic practice.
 
Pussyfooting addresses tropes of female identity in meme-like fashion, short humorous moments of insight that survey the depressingly vast catalogue of problems perpetrated by a clueless culture of patriarchy. Any one of the issues referenced might be a full show; the intolerance and misunderstanding of sexual orientation, the disempowerment of women even over the agency of their clothing choices (seen so vividly and disturbingly now in France’s burkini ban) or the deft undermining of women’s voices as authoritative or knowledgeable about ‘male’ subjects. Similarly, the show enacts a challenge of the logical fallacy that a woman is defined by female genitals, or periods, or not having a penis. As the fringe happens this year in the shadow of the Rio Olympics, the interrogation of gender and identity is brought into sharper relief by the shameful questioning of South African sprinter Caster Semenya’s fitness to race by pundits and the press. The performers encourage the audience to question uncritical assumptions of fixed biological definition by referencing women who identify as such without adhering to prescribed biology or meaningless societal conventions.

- Lewis Church

Pussyfooting is on at 20.10 at Paradise in the Vault until August 28th. Wheelchair Acces, Level Access, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets, Relaxed Performances - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/pussyfooting

Knotworks Theatre: http://knotworksox.tumblr.com
 
Burkini Ban/Clothing Agency: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/burkini-swimwear-ban-france-nice-armed-police-hijab-muslim-a7206776.html
 
Understanding the Caster-Semenya Controversy: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/20/sports/caster-semenya-800-meters.html?_r=0
 
The Sporting Spectacle (Jennifer Doyle), Capturing Semenya: https://thesportspectacle.com/2016/08/16/capturing-semenya/

ANYTHING THAT GIVES OFF LIGHT // The TEAM & National Theatre of Scotland

Two Scotsmen and an American woman walk into a bar and... The set-up for fringe stalwarts the TEAM's collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland might sound jokey, but that's not how the action or fiercely political argument plays out. All three characters are experiencing an identity crisis of sorts, and seek brittle refuge in each other as they attempt to navigate or make sense of their disquietude. One of the Scottish men is sunk in toxic fury following the twin referenda of Independence and EU membership; the other no longer knows how to connect to the land of his birth, having lived in London for years; while the American woman is plagued by anxiety related to climate change.

The question that roils across the stage is: what constitutes identity? When the three first start chatting, it's innocuous stuff: whiskey and cinema, commodities and popular culture. But their road trip in a caravan to the west coast of Scotland is also a journey deeper into history, to the events that scar the land and seep into a country's consciousness. What they find in history, inevitably, is violence: in Scotland, the Highland Clearances, during which small-scale farmers were forcibly evicted from their land; mirrored in the Appalachians, home of the American woman, by the mass clearance of native Americans – enacted in part by the Scottish diaspora. This intertwining of roots is underscored by the presence of a live band, the Bengsons, who dress like clans women and play songs redolent of both landscapes.

The events re-enacted might seem to have no direct connection with the trio on stage – except that all three of them benefit from the exploitative capitalist structure that violence brought forth. Can the dedicated Scotsman really claim Adam Smith as a national hero, when the philosopher was the architect of the modern free market, and “threw the left-wing on the pyre” by giving them hope of a sympathetic liberalism? The fact that his friend works in London finance is a wedge between them; asked why he's so angry, he replies, reasonably, that it's because: “our political system is sick”.

In her book Depression: A Public Feeling, academic Ann Cvetkovich gives a cogent argument for tracing the roots of individual depression back to “histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, legal exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives”. Anything That Gives Off Light brings the ghosts of those histories to crude and noisy life; the characters might not be exorcised of their grief by it, but they at least find a new accommodation with each other.

- Maddy Costa

Anything That Gives Off Light is on at 19.30 at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre until 26 August. See venue for accessibility information - http://www.eif.co.uk/2016/light#.V73Ji45LUfo

On identity crises among adolescents and adults: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201203/are-you-having-identity-crisis

Poet Harry Giles on identity and writing in Scots: https://harrygiles.org/2014/04/17/hou-writin-in-scots-maiters-tae-me/

How to fix America's identity crisis: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/a-new-american-melting-pot-214011

On depression as a response to anti-blackness: http://www.forharriet.com/2016/03/depression-is-political.html#axzz4I9SB3Wsn

Choosing action over despondency: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/05/dont-give-angry-population-hard-govern-depressed-population-easy

Ann Cvetkovich's website: http://www.anncvetkovich.com/

HAPPY YET? // Open Mind Productions

“Why can't you be happy?”
“Why can't you make something of yourself?”

Such are the questions asked of Torsten, the central character in Happy Yet?, by his bewildered family: questions for which there are no answers. Torsten has an unspecified and undiagnosed mental health condition that sometimes makes him incapable of getting out of bed and sometimes transforms him into a glitteringly energetic compulsive liar. He's already been rejected by his parents as the runt of their litter, whose only problem is a failure to “discipline” himself. When the play takes place, he is approaching 40 – but pretending to one of his many girlfriends to be nearing 30 – and living with a brother, much to the dismay of his sister-in-law, who is generally required to clear up the mess that his spurts of whirling devilry leave behind.

“Nothing he does makes any sense.”
“I don't know what he's thinking.”

The playwright, Katie Berglof, is young (she's studying at Edinburgh University), but writes from experience: her programme note mentions an uncle, “misdiagnosed and misunderstood”, who lived with her family “until his death”. It's easy to read Nina, the young girl on stage throughout Happy Yet?, as a representation of Berglof herself. Nina is the only character for whom Torsten isn't a problem: they play chess together, he helps her with her Ibsen homework, she chats with him non-judgementally. Seeing the action through Nina's innocent eyes encourages the audience to be less judgemental, too, especially when events become far-fetched (for instance, when Torsten persuades a police officer on duty to join him in getting drunk). Ibsen and his Swedish contemporary Strindberg hover in the background throughout, Berglof reaching towards them in her attempt to transmute the personal into the state-of-a-nation.

“All you do is throw pills at problems.”
“You can talk about these things in New York – not in Sweden.”

Throughout the play, Berglof makes jagged comments about (the paucity of) mental health provision in Sweden; she includes one character who works as a mental health professional, and makes her grimly unsympathetic. In Finland, alternative treatments for psychosis under the rubric Open Dialogue avoid medication and instead include family and friends in a circle of care, absorbing neurodiverse mental health into the community. By such measures, Torsten could be receiving the best care possible – except that, since the family themselves lack support, it's insufficient.

- Maddy Costa

Happy Yet? is on at 11.50 at Surgeon's Hall until August 27th. Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/happy-yet

Swedish mental health provision under attack: http://www.thelocal.se/20150818/swedish-mental-health-care-blasted-after-stabbing

Sweden's place in the global happiness index: https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/may/14/mental-illness-happiest-country-denmark

On compulsive lying disorder: http://www.compulsivelyingdisorder.com/what-is-compulsive-lying-disorder/

On bipolar disorder: https://www.rethink.org/diagnosis-treatment/conditions/bipolar-disorder

On Open Dialogue in Finland: http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2015/02/12/open-dialogue-care-model-put-mental-health-social-work-back-map/

and: http://www.mindfreedom.org/kb/mental-health-alternatives/finland-open-dialogue

Open Dialogue in London: http://opendialogueapproach.co.uk/

Madlove, artist the Vacuum Cleaner's new approach to asylum: http://madlove.org.uk/