The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Edinburgh Festival: Dance highlights
Various venues, throughout August
This year’s Edinburgh International Festival will play host to two of the country’s top choreographers who will both be putting on deeply personal works.
The multi award-winning dancer and choreographer Akram Khan will be making his final performances in a fulllength production with XENOS.
This solo piece explores our links to the past and present with its focus on the 1.5 million Indian soldiers who fought in the First World War trenches only for their stories to be suppressed in its aftermath. Khan also has another EIF project on the go this year, as he helps put together Kalamata, a large-scale outdoor performance in another show of unity for the fallen of the War.
Science and choreography have long come together in the work of pioneering choreographer Wayne Mcgregor and he continues this strain with Autobiography. Having had his own genetic code sequenced, a mass of data is sampled before every show to determine exactly what his dancers will do on stage, ensuring a unique, one-off performance each time. If all that sounds rather too convoluted and conceptual, it might be an idea to simply sit back and let the skills of Wayne Mcgregor wash over you.
Other International Festival delights come from the L-E-V Dance Company with their two-part Love Cycle; Philippe Saire Company’s family-friendly spectacle, Hocus Pocus and in a feat of innovation that has to be seen to be believed, Cold Blood is a feature-length cinemadance show which tells various stories simply through the idiosyncratic beauty of dancing fingers.
That might sound like the sort of thing the Fringe would be up to, but their dance programme has plenty of sophisticated treats of their own on the bill.
Tap dancing has become more innovative in recent times and the Old Kent Road troupe ramp it up further with OSCILLATE, a show about the difficulty of communication, while an Australian scottish collaboration results in The Spinners, an evocative journey into Greek myth.
The Troth features more First World War reflections as the Akademi group retell the story of one soldier’s sacrifice to save another.
Australian company Burn The Floor entertain us with an explosion of tango, rumba, salsa and jive, and Juilliard trained Laura Careless pulls together a wide array of collaborators for Shewolves, revolving around some of the lesser-known names from history who proved to be remarkable female leaders.
And a bolt-on crowd-pleasing hit seems assured from Tokyo’s Wasabeats Crew who bring us Break Free, with champion urban dancers portraying a daring escape from jail.