Edinburgh Festival is well known not only for its comedies and musicals of a more mainstream variety, but also as a platform for new and more artistic representations of performance. Chess is a beautiful dance production whose narrative tells the story of battles of love and war during a troubled Chinese Dynasty. It uses traditional Chinese movement to narrate a beautiful story with a tragic ending.
Chess is Dansmusician’s first outing at the Fringe and they provide a wonderful insight to the Asian Culture. The costumes that are used are stunning and the performance is flawless. There is a wonderful fluidity to their movement which is interspersed with outbreaks of acrobatic feats from the male lead. However the show is very intense and will not provide entertainment to the majority of people who expect dance shows to be crowd pleasing and constantly energetic. This is truly a piece of unapologetic cultural art performed through a medium that is relatively unknown in Western Society.
The cast do a good job telling the story through their movement vocabulary however much of the verbal narration is lost on the audience as their English is at times incomprehensible. Overall, Chess is a beautiful show worth a look but only if you are interested in viewing something culturally opposite to our own.
3/5 
Chris Kidd
