ON the track to recognition, starting blocks can be mounted by starlets alongside peers for whom the way ahead will imperceptibly fork. Tap-dancing artistes who totally know their stuff may get shuffled to Wyoming (or elsewhere) for endless earnest address to non-entities. 

In Lost Soles (★★★★★) at Assembly Roxy, dancing actor Thaddeus McWhinnie Phillips seemingly fritters away quite a bit of stage time setting up unprepossessing retro objects and props, nattering amiably the while.

His moderate pace is deceptive. Key moments arise. Abrupt set-pieces convulse with layered information and skill. Such flurries open portals to a world we could fruitfully acknowledge — the world of the unsung. 

We see how the vaudevillian Wonder of Wyoming nurses stinking reviews and mentally replays career mishaps and wrong turns, none of which erode dedication to complex tapping and the mastery thereof.

In fluid manoeuvre, the Wonder finds his eventual niche in anonymity; in happily (ecstatically even) covering all traces.

Embodying renown at Festival Theatre, L-E-V Dance Company return to Edinburgh International Festival to reward their fans with Chapter 3: The Brutal Journey of the Heart (★★★) — which pumping organ is printed (and sported) on the upper left of elegant skinsuits by Maria Grazia Chiuri — Christian Dior Couture. 

It’s not easy to further discern any aura of romance. With sculpted exactitude and ritual pace, sensuality is indicated. Or is it sexualisation? 

Here on the vast blacked-out stage, seven lithe individuals take on the inscrutably refined body-language of elite podium dancers whose shifts happen to coincide.

Heads and arms describe complex parabolas while footwork features copious variations on a kind of flamingo mince (as if wearing invisible fetish heels) or else a wide-apart splay that throws kneecaps to east and west and plummets the pelvis earthward. 

People momentarily enjoyed trying bits out in the foyer afterward. 

Does witness of this brutal journey hurt to watch? Providing we tune out lyrics that suggest we “eat a bowl of cactus,” it’s analgesic to groove in one’s seat a bit while the soundtrack’s unvarying beat carries the divertissement forward.

Elsewhere in the mix we repeatedly hear the words “You’re one of those creatures that simply are” and this jars pleasingly with the visible arena of sustained anatomical distortion. 

Audience fascination built palpably, amid pleasure in the witness of physical execution and awareness of choreographers Sharon Eyal and Gai Behars’ imaginative impulse in bringing all this to a heady boil and simmer. The ovation that ensued was briefly reversed. The performers clapped us too!

We had, after all, crossed a cordon. L-E-V Dance Company are perceived within the cultural apparatus of the state of Israel, hence their EIF appearance (and the Festival Theatre pavement) provided a platform for vocal non-violent protest from advocates of Palestinian human rights. 

In breaching the crowd of allies (and somehow processing the searing information proffered) we gained cosy premises while acknowledging how art making can be porous to societal comment. Then the curtain went up on Eyal and Behar’s obsessively watertight aesthetic. 

You may have noticed how I have blatantly called them choreographers. They nominate themselves as “co-creators.” This world is their oyster.

Lost Soles runs until August 28; info: assemblyfestival.com; The Brutal Journey of the Heart run ended.