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Participatory show inspired by Great Depression dance-offs is eagerly anticipated highlight of festival fringe Many things have been asked of audiences to the Edinburgh festival fringe. Recent years have seen brave visitors having their feet gently washed by a stranger, being hectored by actors posing as Nazi camp guards, and “dating” young Belgian performers. This year’s fringe, however, which opens this weekend, sees the arrival of an eagerly anticipated show that is literally an endurance test: a four-hour competitive dance marathon . Its most important rule is: keep your feet moving. According to the creators of the piece, the audience’s sheer exhaustion is part of the point: “There is a natural fatigue that sets in after about three hours,” said Stephen O’Connell, one of the members of the Canadian artists’ collective Bluemouth Inc . “When people begin to dance in the show, you can almost sense the physiological shift that happens, they really go into their bodies. And when you are physically exhausted, you go through something; step over a threshold of experience.” On the opening night the audience was put through a registration process – including signing a waiver in the case of injury – and given a bib with a competitor’s number on it. Taken to the marathon venue, they were then allotted partners at random, a handful of whom were the company’s so-called “embedded dancers”. At first the performers blended in invisibly with the ordinary members of the public, but as the evening went on they would emerge from the crowd to perform wild breakdance turns, or to sing, or to recite poetry. Obliged to interact with strangers, the audience was at first a little uncertain: but as the dancing began they started to relax and, as feet became weary and inhibitions were shed, to feel an odd intimacy. At the same time, the event is competitive, with regular eliminations of participants and a gradual ratcheting-up of tension towards the final dance-off, though dancers eliminated early, were encouraged to keep on dancing non-competitively. The piece is in part inspired by the dance marathons that became popular in the US during the Depression, during which competitors would collapse from exhaustion, a phenomenon that formed the backdrop to Sydney Pollack’s film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?. “The show is,” said Bluemouth’s Ciara Adams, “partly about the theory of natural selection: the survival of the fittest. In the dance marathons of the Depression, people would watch children utterly exhaust themselves: it was actually quite cruel.” One of the members of the audience at the opening performance was playwright David Greig, who says his recent work, including his fringe play The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart , has been influenced by seeing Dance Marathon in Ireland by chance a few years ago. “Dance Marathon as it were ploughs you up,” he said. “The fact that your body is always moving takes you away from a ‘head place’ and moves you into your body. You are placed with a partner, who is probably a stranger, and you have to talk to them. Slowly through the piece, the show begins to build a community in the room. Because you are a participant in the piece, it is as if you’ve been invited on to the stage in a play to be part of the crowd scenes, or to hold a spear. At the same time, the show is melancholy. It is an elimination game, after all: it is difficult not to think about death and loss.” Dance Marathon is, emphatically, not an intimidating or “difficult” theatrical experience, according to Greig. “Any granny could turn up and not find it avant-garde.” He believes that such participatory theatre, until recently largely the preserve of the experimental fringes, is becoming more and more mainstream. It is certainly a feature of a growing number of Edinburgh shows, including this year’s piece Audience , from the Belgian company Ontroerend Goed. That show will, according to producer Richard Jordan, literally turn a camera on to the audience to celebrate – and question – the power of crowds. “It is a portrait of a collective, a mass,” he said. It both celebrates the power of the live, singular event but also nods to a world of intense social networking in which “we have become much more aware of each other; we can know what each other is doing”. For Greig, the question is not how long the craze for participatory theatre will last, but the way in which it will develop, become more popular, and “how it will work when it reaches the stages of the National Theatre and the West End”. Dance Marathon is at the Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, as part of Edinburgh festival fringe until 14 August Other Edinburgh highlights The fringe continues until 29 August. Edinburgh international festival opens on 12 August. Edinburgh international book festival opens on 13 August. Julian Sands in a Celebration of Harold Pinter Sands is directed by John Malkovich, who took to the streets of Edinburgh on Thursday to do a spot of flyering. Pleasance Courtyard, until 21