REVIEW: Waxen Figures, Muto Major, EdFringe 2025 ★★★

And you’ve forgotten your own mother tongue.”

Waxen Figures invites you into a multisensory world, where innovation and tradition dance together, reawakening forgotten truths through a bold, poetic lens. This was an immersive audiovisual experience ambitiously using a variety of mediums including dance, sound art and live vocals.

When you look out to the moon do you see the moon in you? A rejection of Sassenach language, the piece embraces body language and Gaelic to deliver storytelling and visceral warnings. Waxen Figures is a compelling performance blurring the line between past and present.

Performed and created by Muto Major, this production is a study in ancestral return. Beginning as a sonic invitation, Waxen Figures invites us into a supernatural fever dream where performers call and sing out to summon what has been buried beneath modern noise. As the performers move through ritual, they become trapped lost in the liminal space but through a rite of passage the ensemble begins to reclaim what was once severed. 

As the first two performers peel onto stage rattling a bell and cupping a glowing candle, the tone is set for the centrality of sound and light. The performance is grounded in agile, spiritual, contorting choreography, with the ensemble working symbiotically. This is dance as ritual, a push and pull between control and mutual response. Costumes and bodies become canvas for laser projection, breaking the boundary between human and nature. 

Lighting transforms the space as uplighter beams, laser effects, and golden washes introduce an ethereal, ancestral presence. Haze is beautifully used to diffuse and deepen the atmosphere.

Drums and a soft-toned triangle induce trance-like states. Ominous, folkish track and punchy base lines accompanied by haunting beautiful vocals immerse the audience in distorted ghostly calls. This is sound art at its most potent.

A projected moon spins over forestry before morphing throughout the performance into distorted human forms. Live feed captures intimate, voyeuristic moments, like a wax-covered doll being stroked and the entrapment of bodies in organza. Laptops and CDJs on opposite sides of the stage call out to each other further entrenching the reciprocal relationship of all elements. Centre upstage holds patterned fabric, a sound bath, candles, crystals, and a woven basket, grounding the ceremony in memory and presence.

Waxen Figures is a meditative live experience using ritual teetering on the porous, sometimes indistinguishable boundary between living entities. 

Unapologetically rooted in folk.

You can catch Waxen Figures from August 3rd – 16th at Summerhall from 4:30pm (60mins). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.

Image Credit: Siyao Li