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This is such a festival show: uncategorisable, buzzing, slightly chaotic and unlike anything else. As director Christie Lee Manning of Response Theatre Company tells us at the outset, I Made You a Mixtape is not a play, not a musical, not (really) a dance show, even though it is pretty much only dance all the way through, plus some hand-written captions. But it’s the kind of dance that real people do – or how you’d like to think you could dance, especially if you were nine girls at a college dorm party somewhere in North America in the 1990s, which is the setting here.

The show fully embraces nostalgia from the off: camcorder, cassette tapes, the Friends board game, Sporty Spice’s wardrobe, and a pop-punk, alt-rock soundtrack (Blink-182, No Doubt, Red Hot Chili Peppers – not the Britpop/trip-hop 1990s of the UK), with live drums and guitar to make it all the more visceral.

Whether it’s the music of your youth or not, what’s universal, and infectious, is the palpable sense of possibility among these young women about to set out in the world, on the brink of all the good things to come. It’s the beautiful time where it feels like life is yours for the taking (maybe the 90s felt more like that than today). You can go wild because you feel safe, and the giddy energy is frothing like that bottle of Dr Pepper they’ve got on the snack table. The girls feed on music and friendship, they hug and cry and fall out and make up, and sway to songs, mouthing words with faraway eyes or punch out lyrics; all that pure joy and hope lived out through moving your body to music.

They each have their own physical signature: Latin dance, waacking, hip-hop, straight off MTV, but together they add up to more than that – that’s female friendship all over. We’re introduced to the women and told that after tonight each will have a different path. Some of this plays out within the songs, but there’s a real missed opportunity to make the emotional life of the piece sing and so much more could be made of the characters and inner drama. With a bit more intention it could be a CoverGirl mascara-down-the-face tearjerker as well as just a good party.