When there are 3,193 shows on the Edinburgh Fringe, coming up with a good title is an important way to get noticed. With Extremely Bad Dancing to Extremely French Music, Karl Jay-Lewin has succeeded in that but it's probably the strongest thing about the show.
Jay-Lewin is a 51-year-old dance artist based in Moray in the north east of Scotland. For this piece of absurdist comedy he’s worked with composer Matteo Fargion, best known for his duets with choreographer Jonathan Burrows, where the pair make wry dance theatre pieces based on neat structures and silly games.
Extremely Bad Dancing… is like a less good version of that, based on a series of “extreme” premises for both performer and musician (Tim Parkinson): Extremely Insistent, Extremely Wagnerian, Extremely Emotional, Extremely Left Wing, Extremely Vulgar (cue rhythmic swearing), etc etc.
The reveals of each title, and the juxtapositions of them, are funny but they’re generally funnier than the material that follows.
The show begins promisingly with a confessional outburst from Jay-Lewin, banging on a drum and shouting about how he’s not really a loud person, except for when he gets angry with his ex-wife, but from there on it feels, as one title describes, extremely pedestrian. There's little to light the imagination; it's a good parlour game but it doesn’t add up to much beyond that — although to be fair, other sections of the audience found more to laugh about. Not extremely bad, just mostly meh.
Until Sunday (0131 225 5525, dancebase.co.uk)
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