TRIPTYCH REDUX
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
★★★★★
“It is dance you can read, dance that is language, dance that is legible”
Australian choreographer Lewis Major’s mixed repertory Triptych Redux sweeps between the inner and outer worlds—a whirling maelstrom of motion, sound, and light—holding us in its pull from first breath to final blackout.
Comprising Prologue, Unfolding, and Epilogue (in two parts: Lament and Act 2), the evening is sculpted with a precision that balances momentum and pause. Major’s movement language spins into stillness, weight folding into the body’s centre before rolling outwards in waves. At its heart is a motif: the sudden cascade of motion and a turn that halts as if time itself has caught its breath, the dancer suspended between propulsion and repose, like that moment in a cascading ocean wave when we have a divine yet potent stillness. These are three works and four sections, but mostly, they feel like one thing. One glimpse into a specific topography.
The cast—Rebecca Bassett-Graham, Abbey Harby, Felicity Chadwick, Lewis Major, Stefaan Morrow, and Elsi Faulks—navigate this vocabulary with unerring focus: sliding in socks across the floor, turning and arresting, lifting and sculpting, sketching chalky lines in white powder, tossing it skywards so it drifts and clings like a ghost of movement. There is a known language here.
The structure unfolds with the quiet logic of an ecosystem: trio, duet, quartet, duet for women, duet for men, mixed duet, and a final solo. Music shifts between sections, yet the transitions are seamless—each dance feeding the next, unfolding unhurried and organically. The opening has the feel of ritual, port de bras carried in unison, then broken into counterpointed foldings of the body, as though testing the architecture of the space. There is a haunting duet of stunning partnering where Graham never touches the floor.
Most theatrical reviews fail to mention lighting designers. If the lighting designer does their job well, we often take the illumination for granted; our minds focus on what is being lit, rather than the process of illumination. Lighting, here, is no afterthought but a partner. Co-designed by Major and Fausto Brusamolino, it shapes bodies into relief, flickers like memory, or cuts lines across the stage, always one state dissolves into another without a seam. In Unfolding, Brusamolino casts lines that scan the space, fabrics of shifting patterns, and a spinning “balance beam” of light that demands the dancer’s absolute precision—another kind of movement feat, this time in illumination, and the dancer dancing with light. Lighting designers are fascinating—many spend their days in darkened spaces, sculpting with lumens. The best, like Brusamolino and Major, give only what is needed—never a lumen more. They make our eyes reach for the image, forcing us to focus.
And I have to mention that when the side lights came on, casting warm sculptural amber light on the dancer’s body, those of us who have been watching dance at the fringe drank it in the way an unwatered house plant soaks up a long-awaited drink. Thank you.
Debussy’s Gymnopédies closes the work: a single dancer, powdered and solitary, bathed in a narrow shaft of light. A foot draws a circle; the body answers with arcs of its own—a prayer, a farewell. The music erodes into drone and dissonance, tension mounting until the final swell tips us into a sudden, absolute blackout.
Major’s world is one where light and body are inseparable, where every turn risks arrest, and every arrest holds the seed of the next release. It is dance you can read, dance that is language, dance that is legible, but also dance you can feel without needing to translate.
TRIPTYCH REDUX
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Reviewed on 14th August 2025 at Main House at ZOO Southside
by Louis Kavouras
Photography by Ven Tithing
