^{Pictures: Ste Murray}

It’s hard to say exactly what time the Festival witching hour begins, when bars spill out and appetites turn to hard comedy and debauched cabaret. But this frenetic and captivating piece of pure dance from choreographer Emma Martin certainly fits within that zone. Underpinned with a brain-shuddering score that pounds straight through your organs, composed by Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox, and played live, Martin’s four dance poems peel back the discipline and artfulness that performative dance is based on, to give us something that comes thrashing out from the core of the dancers.

It’s unnerving, discomfiting, almost embarrassing at times to bear witness to someone else’s connection with music in this way; like seeing them naked or hearing their darkest thoughts. It’s the kind of dance you might recognise participating in at a club or party (or shamanic ceremony): bone-shattering beats, your body taken over by a force beyond itself. 

Martin very nebulously relates this to religion. The first piece, ‘Lost Boy’, alludes to the fall of Lucifer, although bare-chested Javi Ferrer Machin could easily be that man on the street after midnight (off his face and powered by a dark hunger and rage) that you swerve to avoid. Machin gives a performance of extraordinary macho aggression and turmoil, whacking his head to the tempo, spreading his shoulders like wings. 

His intensity is more than matched by the gutsy energy of five young dancers in ‘God Is A Girl’, whose popping, posturing cheerleader formation comes with an edge. You do not mess with these girls. They own their identities and they are proud. ‘The Raver’ echoes some of the earlier ‘Lost Boy’: one man alone in the jungle of his own dance. What’s interesting is that both male pieces are solos that eventually barrel into a kind of combative violence, while the female pieces are performed by ensembles, who thrust, writhe and channel a ferocious ownership of their bodies.

In the final poem, ‘Red’ (Martin’s strongest here), three women cast off their lace veils to revel ecstatically in gold bodysuits, sometimes as a group, sometimes taking turns in the spotlight. As well as the Blessed Virgin they are Cerberus, the Furies, Macbeth’s witches, three friends on a night out. Is that private untameable power something that men access alone, while women direct it in social packs towards self-possession of their sexuality; something it might be too dangerous to express alone? Who knows? But what is certain is that Night Dances is truly mesmerising. 

ZOO Southside, until 28 August, 10.30pm.