“D Ý R A is a soundscape of almost unearthly beauty”
D Ý R A is an immersive sound installation from artist Su Shaw (SHHE) who began this project as a 2022 Made in Scotland scratch night contribution. Shaw then was asked to return to present at Summerhall during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August. In some ways, this is the simplest show you will encounter at this year’s Festival, but the more you engage with it, the more you will realize that you have discovered something that is rich, deep, and quite profound. Co-produced by Laura Edmans, with sound production by Su Shaw and Sam Annand, light design by Emma Jones, and set design by Adrian Murray, D Ý R A invites you into a remarkable soundscape, inspired by the Dýrafjörður in Iceland.
The basement of Summerhall gives a few clues that what you are about to experience in D Ý R A is unusual. As you wait in line, and then prepare to enter the space, it feels like a rite of passage. And like all rites of passage, you have to be willing to leave everything behind. You must remove your shoes. Enter an empty space — what seems like a white geodesic dome with the northern lights shifting across the surfaces. You are invited to lie down on comfortable mats, looking upwards. And then D Ý R A begins. Perhaps the experience is slightly different for everyone, but the careful layering of the top sounds with the barely perceptible deeper sounds affect not just the ears, but the eyes as well. Sometimes the intensity becomes almost too much. It is like a scouring of the senses. But it is not painful, just wonderfully mind clearing. At the end of fifty minutes, you will not want to leave. Fortunately, D Ý R A’ s team have thoughtfully allowed an extra ten minutes in which you can gradually return from your sound trip, ready to re-engage with the world you left behind.
Shaw has created this extraordinary soundscape from collecting “found sounds.” What this means in practice is selecting a particular location — the Dýrafjörður in the Westfjords — and exploring it in a minimalist way. The music of D Ý R A is recognizable as ambient, but what is so paradoxical about it is that it is composed out of all the different kinds of silence that Shaw has found in the Westfjords. Silence, it turns out, has a remarkable effect on the mind. D Ý R A is a soundscape of almost unearthly beauty, but it is also an exercise in listening. As you transition between the sounds and the silences, something happens. You absorb the experience, but leave something of yourself behind. The noise of a familiar life that you brought with you, perhaps. When the show is over, it is hard to return to sounds of mundane lives. But there’s something about D Ý R A that has refreshed and renewed. You’ll want to return soon.
Reviewed 6th August 2022
by Dominica Plummer
Photography by Samuel Temple Cryptic Nights
For dates and venues for all Fringe shows, click on the image below
“the plots take just enough unexpected leaps into comic hyperspace that the show is never dull”
Starship Improvise is the perfect piece for fans of classic sci-fi franchises like Star Trek, and the fan conventions that sprang up in their wake. As we all remember, Galaxy Quest was the movie that made fun of both. Starship Improvise will remind audiences of Galaxy Quest, with the add-ed attraction of a show that allows plenty of room for the cast to improvise around the chosen themes for the evening. Judging by the line that waited on the afternoon I was there, actors from the Mischief, Austentatious and Showstopper! companies have found another winner to present as part of their comedy franchise at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. What’s cool about Starship Improvise is that you can just see one show, or you can keep showing up for them all. There’ll be a different episode to improv every time, and a changing cast as well.
The set up in Starship Improvise is as follows: the actors of the popular sci-fi series of Celestia Seven are attending a fan convention. The cast file on stage, talk a bit about the series, what it means to them, and what was really going on behind the scenes. They decide they are going to select a favourite episode, and replay it for the fans. On this particular day, the chosen Celestia Seven episode is all about the Captain’s Birthday. The opening location is the Engine Room, and the emotional theme is Joy. With the parameters set for the improvisations, the cast gets to work. The members of the crew are an obvious mash up of various incarnations of Star Trek, with the tough but emotionally vulnerable captain, the overly logical ship’s surgeon whom she has recently broken up with; the ship’s empath, and of course, the resident alien, who runs around trying to understand humans. In place of the Spock character from Star Trek, however, we have Lab Rador from Canis Major in Celestia Seven.
As the improv gets going, there are lots of opportunities for Starship Improvise to make fun of everything from toxic masculinity to vegetable metaphors. Hmm. Not everything has to make sense, and the audience gets a huge amount of enjoyment from watching the actors miss their cues, mess up their motivations, or just run into a problematic plot line that they can’t get out of. There are moments when we see the tensions between cast members in Celestia Seven spill out into Starship Improvise. It’s all part of the fun, but it’s tough on Method Actors, for some reason.
Co-creator Adam Megiddo (who also plays Lab Rador), and fellow actors Dave Hearn, Ruth Bratt, Charlotte Gittins, Henry Lewis and Henry Shields wing it for every show. They have a list of characters and their various (complicated) relationships both on and off the stage in their heads, and they take it from there. They obviously relish the “act by the seat of your pants” set up in Starship Improvise. And with reason. They have a bunch of devoted fans in the audience who are quite happy to watch anything they do.
Starship Improvise is an easy and entertaining way to spend an hour at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It’s true that it does rely a little too much on familiar memes and themes. But the plots take just enough unexpected leaps into comic hyperspace that the show is never dull. Sometimes it’s good to just settle back in one’s seat, and enjoy the fun.
Reviewed 7th August 2022
by Dominica Plummer
Photography by Andrew Pugsley
For dates and venues for all Fringe shows, click on the image below
