Created and Directed by Natasha Gilmore and Robbie Synge

Tucked away in a corner of the Dovecot Studios, Barrowland Ballet’s Family Portrait makes a welcome return from its original Covid-inception.

A semi-live experience with an immersive gallery aesthetic for audiences, Family Portrait finds four screens surrounding viewers who perch on pivoting stools with 360 degrees of movement to ensure they don’t miss any of the action or storytelling. But for some of it, you’ll have to be quick.

This forty-minute experience film installation, filmed in the woodlands of the Cairngorms, focuses on Barrowland’s artistic director Natasha Gilmore, and her three children, explore the wildness and space as the children and Gilmore express their own responses to nature – the beautiful, and the morbid.

What follows is a rich experience, and remarkably deep in the power of its immersion and command of attention – each frame completing a piece of the ‘puzzle’. It’s wonderful to watch as Gilmore or one of the kids leap out of frame, only to land with a thud in the next. Robbie Synge’s cinematography is exceptional, playful, and showcasing gravity and weight while Davey Anderson’s score matches the expression of the movement.

It transitions between a wave of themes and ideas: motherhood and the natural way of things, movement and creativity so wonderfully expressed by each of Gilmore’s children. But principally, as with a few Edinburgh Fringe shows this year, Family Portrait looks to our fragile, and frankly broken, relationship with the natural world surrounding us.

The choreography is largely off the cuff, free and inspired as Otis Bazie Gilmore, Inigo Bazie Gilmore, and Frieda Bazie Gilmore express themselves in a manner no self-conscious adult would manage. They roll, muddy, embrace and toy the earth and leaves, investigate the skulls of deceased wildlife, and often work with their mother in beautifully fulfilling ways. 

A pertinent reminder to ensure the value, and honesty, of nature, is passed to generations, Family Portrait goes beyond a one-dimensional explanation or production as its eloquent choreography and editing make for an enriching experience, unafraid to embrace every element of life, and of course, death.