Working On My Night Moves is a piece that makes other work on the Fringe look dated.
It’s like watching the wordless, live creation of a piece of contemporary art, one that fills the stage surreally with ladders and swinging lights and floating chairs, the expert use of props as simple of silver foil and fans. Directed by Nisha Madhan who created it with Julia Croft, the artists on stage are Julia Croft and Anna Bennington who alternate in identikit costumes, creating the work around them with dangerously dangling lights, and pinafores and tatty wigs of Dorothy in “a Wizard of Oz fever dream”.
Like contemporary art, it comes with the latest language – it’s “a performative investigation of potential feminist futurism(s)”. This sort of talk can baffle and bemuse, as it does on the labels of contemporary art galleries, but set the cynicism aside, sit back, watching and letting thought float.
Award-winning artists Julia Croft and Nisha Madhan alternate in identikit costumes, creating the work around them with dangerously dangling lights, playing pinafores and tatty wigs of Dorothy in “a Wizard of Oz fever dream”. It’s developed at the prestigious Battersea Arts Centre.
Don’t turn up to this Summerhall show expecting the usual late night fare, but stop and take time out away from colour, clowns and comedy, and feel a bit like you’ve walked out of a circus into the Tate Modern.
Art buyers talk of the walkaway test – when you leave an exhibition, does an artwork stay with you. Days after seeing Working on My Night Moves, the show is still hovering in the mind.
Working on My Night Moves, Summerhall Old Lab, 21.55, until 25 August 2019. Tickets here.
