Edinburgh 2013
The Edinburgh International Festival is in full swing and throughout the city theatres and concert halls are filled with opera singers, musicians, stage performers and dancers ready to entertain. Every August since 1947 Edinburgh has been filled with fabulous performances and unusual shows. This year, however, the dance programmes in particular are something special!
While usually the festival is famed for its selection of international dancers, this year it is more home made. The Scottish Ballet and Scottish Theatre Dance companies joined forced to produce an innovative new programme entitled New Voices, which included not one but five world premieres. James Cousins’ Still it Remains kicked off the performance with a quartet inspired by Middle Eastern arabesque and set to the music of Rahman Asadollahi. He was followed by Henri Ogaike’s In this Storm, which matches urgent combative moves with Aleksandra Vrebalov’s use of bells, voices and drums; creating a riveting performance. Then Helen Pickett’s The Room was premiered; this piece follows the story of two couples exploring their domestic problems. Finally, Martin Lawrance’s Dark Full Ride with music by Julia Wolfe produced ‘an elaborating geometry of rhythm and line that effortlessly rides the bucking-bronco percussion’. Just as the audience thinks it’s over, however, seven dancers fill the foyer to perform Kristen McNally’s Foibles a fantastic piece, which really utilises the open space of the entrance hall.
On top of this, the Scottish Ballet have also put on a performances of Kenneth MacMillan’s interpretation of Hamlet Sea of Troubles and Christopher Hampson’s Silhouette . There was also a collection of contemporary classics, the most celebrated of which is Twyla Tharp’s The Fugue, and the Scottish Dance Theatre produced SisGO ‘half club night, half performance art’ where the audience are invited to walk amongst the dancers. For children Fleur Darkin’s William Blake inspired Innocence captures the audience in a world of tigers and angels. Dancewear Central’s favourite, however, and ‘Edinburgh’s hottest’ act is Jean-Louis Ouvrard and the Non Nova company’s troupe of pirouetting carrier bags. Performing L’Apres-Midi d’un Foehn with the aid of carefully calibrated electric fans these talented plastic bags certainly have a new take on Debussy’s classic.
There is still plenty to see before the festival ends though. From August 24th to August 26th, the choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s, famous for his work on the film Black Swan, new company LA Dance Project will be making its British debut, and the festival will end with what promises to be a spectacular mixture of urban, modern, burlesque dancing and slapstick comedy in José Montalvo’s Don Quichotte du Tracadéro.