Top Ten 2003 Winnipeg Fringe

1. Dancing With Angels(Venue 6 - MTC Warehouse).

Far and away, the best show I've seen at this year's Fringe. It is a fairy tale for adults about the effects of war on a population, with lots of parallels to the current situation in Iraq. This is a very layered work. The metaphor of losing dances could represent looting (how culture is destroyed during a war) or how, if we forget history, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

The metaphor of reinventing stories represents propaganda (each side puts whatever spin they want on the war). Also, it is amazing to see how Bill Buffery and Gill Nathanson bring this story to life. How they create life (a child) is remarkable. And this show has the most beautiful killing sequence I've ever seen.   Justin Olynyk UMFM

Certain performers and certain theatre companies justifiably evoke intense audience loyalty and critical acclaim. multi story's Bill Buffery and Gill Nathanson have that consistent capacity. My recommendation is to see anything and everything they do. Even if the venue standing in for the Greek island of Naxos is hotter at midnight than the real thing at mid-day. Even if the Film Studio is hot enough to combust The Firebird. Even if they read postal codes in a telephone booth. None of this will matter when their performance magic works. For me, multi story is the Fringe's embodiment and apogee.

Dancing with Angels is an allegorical adult fairy tale. Using only the company's two actors and their minimalist props (half a dozen pieces of coloured cloth , a couple of suit jackets and a couple of  hats, a watch, a thermos, a stick, a dress and a lipstick), the pair create nine different characters. Buffery plays the protagonist, a vapid air-head whose job in life is to dance "the glorious victories of our valiant nation". Not himself a soldier, and consistently denying his culpability in the inevitable war that ensues, his role is to dance up a storm of jingoistic pride that enables military recruitment. Although both actors possess mobile, expressive faces, Nathanson's is particularly well suited to the creation of eight diverse characters that collectively advance the plot.

When the protagonist forgets the dance (or finds the dance of civilisation ceased making sense amidst war's slaughter), he accepts a pact proposed by an angel.  To remember, he must accept all gifts offered to him and kill the donors. In his encounter with an enemy soldier, the protagonist advises that his country's forces had "come to set you free"; to "give you freedom." The unimpressed response is that, "Your dance is not for me."  Having killed the soldier the protagonist admits that, "I thought it would be more difficult." Killing becomes more progressively easier, particularly since each character presses a gift on the former dancer with apparent knowledge and acceptance of the consequences.

These encounters further distance the dim-witted  protagonist from a sense of moral responsibility. He eventually reaches home and tells his mother about his adventures: "I killed them because they gave me a gift ... I did as I was told." Her response is not what he anticipated.

A second encounter with the angel, in which issues of choice and moral agency are explored, concludes the play. As an allegory, audience members get to play god by participating with the company in breathing life into the tales skeletal structure. Linda Harlos  CBC

Don't be fooled by the apparent simplicity of the claim made by Gill Nathanson and Bill Buffery when they tell us that what they are presenting in this vibrant play is "a story, nothing more, nothing less." Ms. Nathanson and Mr. Buffery are the talented pair of actors from England's multi story who have been bringing superb theatre to the Canadian Fringe Circuit for years now, and if you want a true measure of how Dancing with Angels works, then you're well-advised to pay attention to the "multi" part of their company's name. It's complexity has to do with the intersections of art and politics, and of the personal with the global.

The story that Dancing with Angels tells concerns a boy who, in dancing the stories of his nation's history, moves to the beat of a drum that is both celebratory and destructive. In order to continue his dancing, he is trapped inside a seemingly inescapable pattern; he must accept any gift that is offered him, and he must kill the giver of the gift. Mr. Buffery is the boy ("a complete waste of space" as he's described early on) and Ms.Nathanson plays a host of characters - old and young women, the boy's father, and various other victims of war - in the course of their 70 minute story.

In many ways, Dancing with Angels is itself a hybrid, part fairytale, part fable, part comedy, with shades of Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud lurking in its bright shadows. One of its strengths is that it keeps the audience at a distance, so that viewers can measure the effect of the boy's actions as he propels himself kinetically through a brutalized landscape. This landscape is an imaginative one, conjured out of language and movement, and it bears chilling similarities to war-ravaged Iraq. Buffery and Nathanson  acknowledge the play's gloss on global politics, but the heart of their story is in its inquiry into the human folly of  believing that we are the "givers" of freedom to one another. It is a play about the ethical implications of being manifest destiners.

In this moveable farce, the boy comes upon a town where everything has been destroyed. In looking upon this man-made tabula rasa, the question arises: What do you see? There are two answers: "devastation or endless opportunity". Where you as an audience member fall along that spectrum of response will be an accurate measure of how hopeful or pessimistic is your view, not just of the current world situation, but of the larger human condition. Dancing with Angels resolutely hooks you in, and then sets you loose, floating in the air with only your own moral compass as a way of positioning yourself. Don't miss the journey. Robert Enright, Border Crossings

Bill Buffery and Gill Nathanson, collectively known as multi story, hail from the UK, and are probably the two most exceptionally talented people at the Fringe.  What they can do with a minimal stage set and their own bodies and voices possesses a grandeur and magnificence that no massive budget can ever confer on overblown bombastic hacks.

This show is definitely not or the Riverdance crowd - I overheard two yuppie types on the way out saying they didn't get it at all - but for anyone who yearns to know that real theatre is still alive and well, this is the one.  Here are two people who continue a theatrical tradition that spans millennia, and do so with ease. J Paskaruk  NewWinnipeg

In an almost subversive example of an innocuous title underselling a meaty concept, this "fairytale for adults" performed by U.K. Fringe veterans Bill Buffery and Gill Nathanson actually is a dark and surreal satire about the latest Anglo-American adventure in Iraq.

In a modern reworking of an old English folk tale, a daft young man whose sole talent involves dancing the historic dances of his nation suddenly loses his abilities on a far-off battlefield. In order to win it back, he's forced to embark on a journey where he must kill every person who offers him a gift along the way.

The resulting odyssey is cynical, wondrous and funny, as our vapid hero encounters characters intended to represent Iraqi peasants, foreign soldiers and in one hilarious instance, an American speculator. Buffery and Nathanson turn in excellent, physical performances while asking questions about myth-making and nationalism. See this now, before our allies invade someone else. Bartley Kives Winnipeg Free Press