Dancing on the ceiling

Duska Radosavljevic looks at how dance and physical theatre at the festival is shaping up.

A little after midnight one night in 2000, I sat in a rickety community hall watching a mesmerising piece of theatre from Russia, featuring a mixture of mime, dance and marionettes, set to a hypnotic score.

Although not attended to full capacity, the show received a standing ovation by the small but enthusiastic crowd - and this remained a regular audience response to Bertrand’s Toys at Demarco’s.

This was the time when the dance and physical theatre programme of the fringe could barely fill three pages of the brochure and amounted to a mixture of exotic dances at the Garage and impoverished displays of endurance or cliche-ridden student shows at Demarco’s and C venues. All that changed in 2001 when two new houses opened their doors.

By now, as any dance connoisseur will tell you, your festival is not complete without paying a visit to the slightly gothic Aurora Nova at St Stephen’s church - for quirky Europeans with glistening bodies, shaved heads and explosively sentimental physical theatre routines - and the swish Dance Base studios on the Grassmarket - for showcases of hand-picked, sophisticated, stunning and virtuosic performances.

The success of Dance Base can be measured by its steady growth in national significance as some of its previously supported acts can now be seen at the main festival - such as Ashley Page’s Fearful Symmetries with Scottish Ballet. This year the venue will present William Forsyth’s piece for the Curve Foundation - Duo, in the run up to the choreographer’s participation at the main festival with the Royal Ballet of Flanders’ Impressing the Czar.

Otherwise, its endlessly exciting but neatly packaged repertoire of five showcases themed on time, space, motion and gravity is entitled Kinetic and features performers from all over the world, aged 12 to 79.

But this year, yet another venue is set to join the ranks of major dance theatre destinations at the fringe - Zoo Southside on Nicholson Street - which turns its main stage exclusively into a dance platform.

Heralded by the Scottish Dance Theatre’s return to this venue with a new anti-war piece Sorry for the Missiles! and their artistic director Janet Smith’s help with the programming, the repertoire here looks like a considered mixture of work for all tastes and ages - think anything from a silk-clad American Alice in Wonderland and a Korean absurdist allegory on modern living, to rollerblading, breakdancing and an aerial piece inspired by the traditional Scottish ballads.

Elsewhere around town, you should make sure you have tickets for the experiential extravaganza Fuerzabruta, due to take place in a specially rigged up tent in Leith - and don’t forget to wear disposable clothing for the night of combined theatre, clubbing and getting drenched in various liquids.

Along similar lines, the Polish company Biuro Podrozy offers up its version of Macbeth on stilts, with fire, music and menace at the Old College Quad - as a spectacular comeback of the company which took the festival by storm with Carmen Funebre in 1996.

Circus fans can enjoy shows at the Meadows Theatre Big Tops as well as Cirque du Soleil spin-offs - Adam Read with Eclipse at Understairs and Traces at Assembly. Courtesy of Laughing Horse we have the first free physical theatre show this year - a female clowning double act entitled I Am You Are Me at Berlin.

Of the more familiar names, Volcano’s new show A Few Little Drops opens at the Medical Quad as part of the British Council showcase, as does Gecko’s The Arab and the Jew at Pleasance Courtyard. Also at the Pleasance, NIE presents The End of Everything Ever while the rest of the theatre section features a couple of pieces on Nijinsky - one an American, award-winning, one-man show, and the other a Polish creation graced with a Russian theatre award.

You can certainly squeeze both shows in an afternoon, as they are conveniently presented in the Assembly Rooms part of town.

This brings me back to our unrivalled Aurora Nova, which has also been subsumed under the Assembly umbrella this year, seemingly without losing any of its own programming credentials.

Exciting new arrivals include the French trio Decay Unlimited, with their taboo-breaking Cabaret Decay, and Incarnat, a show from Brazil inspired by Susan Sontag’s The Pain of Others. Returning this year are Andrew Dawson with his process-driven experiment Leitmotif utilising eight different directors, Russian-German Do Theatre with Hangman and Polish Song of the Goat with a ritualistic take on medieval history entitled Lacrimosa.

Also returning to the festival for the first time in seven years, is my personal favourite blackSKYwhite with Astronomy for Insects. If its last appearance with Bertrand’s Toys at Demarco’s in 2000 is anything to go by, we will be jumping to our feet in delight, some time after midnight.