Do you dare to enter the starting area? Wet and wild selkie steals the show at stunning Glasgow Arts Festival | stage

A The nurse puts her hand on my back and guides me to the bed. She takes off my shoes, puts me in soft pajamas, and hands me a virtual reality headset. She says mom will come soon to read bedtime story. The Touching Distance ZU-UK reunion is part of Take Me Somewhere, Glasgow’s biennial festival of lively international performance. With a teddy bear pressed into my hand, it’s a deceptively cute start to my day, which ends with taunts from the messengers and a greased-up naked man being hand-fed fish.

“Within Touching Distance” is a slow act of care, walking one audience member at a time along the path of life, from reading a story as a child to holding a walking frame in old age. By blending the physical with the digital, this cleverly designed piece combats technology’s lack of intimacy. When I watch Mum pressing my shoulder with my VR headset, I feel the pressure on my shoulder for real. When I wiggle my toes, I feel like each one is pressed in time with the image. I thought being petted by a stranger would be awkward, but I’m lying in bed so comfortably that contact just feels comfortable and safe.

The show works best in these framed scenes that connect us with physical contact, the story pressed into our skins. But since the bulk of the narrative is told solely through virtual reality, the medium is difficult to latch on to, inviting vague philosophical questions and sorely missing a soft-touch anchor.

Two dance performances that walk the line between the limits of the body and its possibilities. Dressed in an intricately embroidered wedding outfit, Mexican dancer Lucas Avendaño leaps from the indigenous Mexican concept of gender intersectionality.muxhe“To evoke the constraints we’ve invented around identity. In Requiem para un Alcaravan, he picks out slow feminine rituals and interspersed story snippets, and uses us to help create a celebration of queer bodies. We’re bar staff, stage managers, dance partners, and translators. It’s hard to hear an unfilmed improvisation scene over the recorded brass band, But this chaotic procession from marriage to mourning is an entertaining riot of colour, leaving the audience in a blazing tangle of bright streamers.

On the other side of town, Susan Kirnbauer-Bundy challenges expectations about the aging female body. A former principal dancer at the Vienna State Opera, the elegant 83-year-old reclaims the spotlight in Come Back Again, which at times feels like an inner conflict that renders our existence as an audience merely incidental. With flashes of raw beauty, this uneven production shines when Kirnbauer-Bundy is joined by a younger choreographer, Doris Ulich, as the restrictions on the older woman’s movements are in direct contrast to the speed and power of the younger. They dance together, rotating the decades between them, mirror and archive, each exuding the joy of movement. As they sit down together for a Q&A within the show, they are ashamed of the dance industry’s narrow vision that continues to control women’s bodies, and reject the idea that it can be too big or too big to be worth watching.

The highlight of my day was Selkie: The Wet and Wild Show!, a slippery section of high camp that comes with a splash zone warning. Naked and bound by a rope around his ankles “for health and safety reasons”, Scottish artist Craig Manson poses as a mythical seal in human form. He slides greasily into the paddling pool and slides around the stage belly-first, with a perpetual docile smile, and is fed instructions and fish by his swimsuit-clad and increasingly cruel instructors (lavish hammerheads Agnes Evans Forrest and Jessica Kosselin).

In a matching wetsuit, Melissa Toner’s fantastically well-rounded interpretation adds depth and complexity to this wry comedy-tragedy, watching as Selkie interacts with the audience, flirts with Whisper and asks, with wide, uncomprehending eyes, if we’re really going to come home whenever we want. A deliciously irreverent offering, Selkie manages to sneak in unexpected musings on animal rights and the misery of capitalism in its absurdity. All while pumping out signature weird anthems.

To conclude the night, The Last Supper is a bold piece of large-scale political theatre. Mixa is a decade-old Brazilian artist-activist collective, made up primarily of transgender and queer artists. With experience of homelessness and gender-based violence, they met in São Paulo shelters. They deliberately reject the kind of stories you might expect from these details; A serious sob story that will not last a single second on this wild and despicable stage. Instead, under João Turchi’s moody direction, the group announces their final show together: a farewell worthy of The Last Supper.

Grand attempts made in Portuguese to recreate Leonardo da Vinci’s ubiquitous painting are curtailed by constant bickering, from creative discussions to outright fights. They say that if this performance is what they will remember, it must be amazing. So much is thrown into this random club that intentions can sometimes be uninhibited, but the idea of ​​defining your own legacy carries weight, especially since some former Mexa members have disappeared under unexplained circumstances.

The crew’s stubborn and fleeting thoughts are intercut and interrupted, and combined with documentary footage of the difficult training process. But despite all the hostility, the Last Supper is an invitation. Transforming the stage into a banquet for 30 audience members, a lavish meal of meat, fruit and wine is shown to those who are quick enough to get a seat. This fraught and tumultuous performance, fueled by solidarity and built on instability, clings to the messy resilience of the existing family, which can be relied upon in the absence of everything else.

Unexpected discoveries and full participation are a constant at this festival. Across the UK, funding cuts continue to shutter performance venues and festivals, with European comparisons putting our funding models to shame. Last week, MAYK, the company behind Bristol’s luminous international theater festival, Mayfest, was the latest to announce its closure. What a relief that Take Me Somewhere has secured multi-year funding from Creative Scotland, covering the bold experiments of this and the following festival. Bold platforms committed to beauty, chaos, brutality, and risk should always have a seat at the table.