Edinburgh festival dance roundup 2024 – a world of slick moves

The Edinburgh fringe is full of mini seasons: showcases of work being made at home and abroad. As part of the Danish showcase – #Danish – Granhøj Dans company and choreographer Palle Granhøj are presenting This Is Not Romeo and Juliet (Zoo Southside, ★★★★), a piece that makes an obvious point – love is better than war – in subtle ways.
It lets four dancers, two young, two older, and two musicians (a cellist and a violinist) explore avenues of expressing passion, dancing round one another, sometimes formal, sometimes wild, sometimes grappling on the floor lips locked, or chasing each other, sad and bereft. The musicians are a revelation, playing snatches of Prokofiev and Berlioz as they tangle limbs.
From Performing Arts Made in Germany, choreographers Maria Chiara de’ Nobili and Alexander Miller’s company Miller de Nobili have brought Pack (Dance Base, ★★★★), a study of group dynamics that examines the relationships between five men who define themselves by their skill as dancers. What’s impressive is the way the movement – head spins, one-armed handstands, held poses and supple turns – expresses feeling and thought as well as prowess. The men touch hands tentatively, square up to one another, adopt B-boy poses, offer comfort and provocation. It’s silky, clever and compulsively watchable.
From Australia, under the House of Oz banner, comes Lewis Major, a director and choreographer who has worked with Russell Maliphant. The influence shows not only in the crisp clarity of Maliphant’s Two x Three, which opens a programme called Triptych (Dance Base, ★★★), but in Major’s own pieces, which share Maliphant’s interest in moving bodies under light. Some effects are stunning: a dancer seems to stand at the centre of a bow of solid whiteness, whirring round her like a mixer blade. Two dancers emerge from the shadows for a duet where the woman never touches the floor, wrapping her body round her partner in clinging shapes.
Meanwhile, Dundee-based Scottish Dance Theatre keep the home flag flying with a touring double bill shown as part of the festival’s Made in Scotland showcase. It opens with the dynamic vitality of Roser López Espinosa’s The Flock (Zoo Southside, ★★★★), which places the dancers in a V-formation then sets them off in synchronised patterns of jumps and beats.
Birds are evoked – flat backs, arms outstretched – but not too strongly. It’s the way that movement ripples through the group that is so compelling. At the end of their exertions the dancers collapse, then slowly reassemble, raising one another’s inert bodies, flexing and falling with amazing control before a finale of rushed runs and wheeling spins. The light (by Jou Serra) is white like a sky.
Moving Cloud (Zoo Southside, ★★★), in nice contrast, is a piece of interiors and dusky smoke. In front of the assembled musicians of Trip, a traditional Celtic band based in Glasgow, dancers dressed in smocks, kilts and big trousers crouch and judder, with twisted arms and smooth feet, their movement alternately crimped and uninhibited. Choreographer Sofia Nappi has worked with Hofesh Shechter and studied the gaga whole-body movement method – and you can tell; yet the mood and sense of suppressed emotion is her own.