through warm temperatures

We’ve been raving about @melebroomes since her 2021 show Grin. She returns to #edfringe with a piece that feels like an energising balm. The room is alive on entry: musicians already present, a blue wash kissing Black skin, two women smoothing oil that gleams across muscle. Castor oil is centred as care, memory & lineage, engulfing us in a sensuous spell…✨

Live, looping #cello from Simone Seales grounds the space with a tonic-like drone while bodies cycle between fluidity, glitch & reversal. At times the near-tableaux echo Kabuki theatre’s mie poses, spun forward into something defiantly #contemporary…

through warm temperatures by Mele Broomes © Brian Hartley

The choreography ripples between tenderness & rupture; a sprinter’s crouch folds like origami from an arabesque. Voice is used as muscle here: sighs, sibilance, laughter that snaps like a snarl before stretching to a wail of release. Words are sparse but weighted—seed, oil, flower—repeated & dropped like stones into water. Dismorph is fractured into syllables that anchor, then reinvent movement & moment. Performer-integrated BSL from Salma Faraji adds another register, weaving gesture into the soundscape…

through warm temperatures by Mele Broomes © Brian Hartley

Design is spare but charged: red vs blue lighting, casual trainers & fitted clothes that honour the body’s curves, a statement red dress that gives #AlvinAiley’s ‘Firebird’ vibes & a muppet-like boa that seems to animate itself (in what feels like a textural callback to #Grin)...

And then there’s the gaze: late in the piece, dancers stop & point into the audience, locking eyes with deliberate address. It’s a sit-up moment—intimate & confrontational; haunting & communal…

This is Broomes’ first live edfringe performance in seven years; it lands as both return & renewal: at once an invite to the cookout & a call to arms. 🙌🏾 5/5

#edfringe #fringe #edinburgh #dance #review #festival #5star