In the Fields Project presents Fields (Extract) at Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2025

Fields (Extract)

Playful and poetic, Fields (Extract) is a compelling performance that draws the audience into a textured landscape of stone, where patterns of dwelling are made and unmade, shaped by land, time and human hands.

The episodic narrative of the performance offers snapshots of lives lived out amidst stony ground where duration expands to take in the enduring labour of ages past, present and perhaps yet to come

Layered with detail and played out to an intermittent sound score, images emerge of agricultural labouring, the toil of turning stony ground, and at the end of the day, the scraping of boots and a laying down to rest on pillows of stone.

Fields (Extract) was made with support from Dance Base, City Moves and Tramway

Performers: Merav Israel, Claire Pençak

Recorded Sound score: Nik Paget-Tomlinson with Jem Le Lievre

"Mesmerising"

"Riveting"

"Deceptively minimalist: two dancers with stones in a space, but oh so many layers and meanings! Ever changing in every second."

"The dance floor is strewn with stones – jutting, hard, grey, white, beige, brown. The dancers bundle stones up in their arms and push or place them round the space. Once a configuration is reached. A nod to each other proclaims their readiness to engage with this dangerous territory."

Audience feedback

Merav Israel

Merav Israel is a dance artist, Feldenkrais Method practitioner and therapist, based in Edinburgh. She is working within the field of somatic movement and improvisational scores. Her work tends to be collaborative, poetic, relational, investigative, with an interest in the natural world and spirituality.

Website: www.meravisrael.com

Makers/Performers

Claire Pençak

Claire Pençak is a dance artist with a cross disciplinary and collaborative practice living and working in the Scottish Borders. Her interest is in how dancing can offer hope-orientated and empathetic practices that nourish ecological relationship and different ways to connect – to ourselves, to others and to the more-than-human world.

Fields (Extract)

Merav Israel and Claire Pencak

Dance Base Studio 3, 17.15, 12 August 2025

Impressions by Peter Nelson:

A field full of stones. Two women, one after the other in succession, move and place them by

hand into shapes and piles, as if in a strange game of Go. A pile becomes a circle; a ragged line is

gathered up into a heap; a new line is set to mark a boundary with one part of the audience. Once

there is su@icient cleared space, one woman roots herself into a small pile of stones, and the

other consolidates it with more stones. A pause. Then the women take hands and begin to move,

together yet separately, maintaining hand contact as they diverge and converge, move apart and

entwine, like articulated parts of a symmetrical body, in synchrony yet not in synchrony. One

places stones to mark the position of the limbs of the other. The stones get caught up in the

dance. A pause. One by one, they move the stones around again, and the whole process repeats

with di@erent stone formations and movement strategies at each stage. Sometimes it seems like

a game, sometimes like combat, sometimes like a strange sort of flocking, intertwining the

animate and the inanimate. Bodies lean shoulder to shoulder, moving as if in support, but also in

opposition. Bodies on their own are pulled to the ground, not just by gravity but by the shaping

properties of the hand-formed field. Awkward animals appear, moving in pairs. The sounds of

vessels being struck in random patterns fills the air from time to time with a gentle resonance,

like movements of the earth.

The presence of hand on stone reflects outwards a tactile sense of shape and texture. The

motions of the hands are preserved in the shifting patterns of the stones on the field. The stones

are not hand-made, but they are hand-felt and hand-moved. They give a sense of things being to-

hand, as Heidegger describes: being as a being-there, a placed place, with a sense of time arising

from the potential of what is to-hand and the purpose it engenders. In this sense, the movement

of the bodies seems to arise out of the purpose in the stones which are to hand. It springs out of

the stones, and it sinks back to them.

The stones have di@erent sizes, shapes, and colours. Some are almost white: many of the

others a dark grey. They seem individual as they are picked up but become part of a pile or a

pattern when they are put down. Their material hardness is heard as scrapes across the ground

or impacts as they collide. Like inert puppets, they appear as characters in a sort of stop-frame

choreography.

At the start, they constitute a stony ground, inimical to seeds. Cleared, they create fertile

spaces, even as the shapes they make - lines, enclosures, spirals - take on a life as the memories

of the motions of the hands. Thus, the dance seems to take place at three overlapping speeds:

the quick placement of stones by hands; the slow movement of the patterns on the land; and in

between, the human motion of two women, dancing.

This reflects many things. The work that goes into shaping the land comes with

handedness. It shows the ways in which life in a place shapes a place, as a place shapes a life.

The pattern of placing and free movement, work and play, is cyclic and mutually reinforcing, yet

always entangled. The random and the contingent co-exist with purpose and intention. Similarly,

the inert and the living constitute a being between them: in-place. Bodies moving, whether living

or inert, are subject to constraint, both physical and intentional. You might say that a stone

cannot have intention, but it's to-hand-ness in itself proposes a certain intentionality in relation

to the possibilities and constraints of the larger field. The self-ing moment of the animate is a

discovery of the distance and memory properties of the inanimate, as well as the mirroring

correspondences of other selves. All of these things are made evident in this work, with beauty

and ingenuity.