Edinburgh International Festival.

VARIOUS VENUES, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND AUGUST 15-SEPTEMBER 5, 2004

There was something for everyone at the Edinburgh Festival 2004, front tributes to past masters to the recent work of two of Europe's most celebrated young dancer-choreographers.

Two triple-bills paid homage to Antony Tudor, the lion's share of responsibility falling to Ballet West. The Salt Lake City company brought just the right sense of refinement and restraint to Lilac Garden (1936). This one act study in social repression is an antique; work like this simply isn't being made anymore. It remains a model of economy, craft, and emotional penetration, here danced with flair and authority, particularly by Christiana Bennett as the suffering lead and Kate Crews in the flashier role of An Episode in His Past.

The feelings are more generalized in The Leaves Are Fading (1975), Tudor's melancholy-tinged ballet of remembered love. Ballet West realized its nuances, demonstrating pockets of musicality both as an ensemble and individually. The tone lightened with the company premiere of Offenbach in the Underworld (1955), a lively, louche, and lovely affair set in a fashionable Parisian care circa the 1870s. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra percolated under Terence Kern's baton while the cast, especially Kristin Hakala's operetta star, sparkled.

It was festival honcho Brian McMaster who suggested Mahler as the hook upon which to hang Rambert Dance Company's first festival appearance in 21 years. The result was a specially packaged program stretching across nearly seven decades. Each dance was a beautifully crafted, quietly moving response to song cycles rendered by front-rank vocalists Jane Irwin and Gerald Finley.

The horror of the school siege in Beslan, Russia, lent a terrible relevance to Tudor's 1937 Rambert commission Dark Elegies, an eloquent, masterfully composed depiction of communal grief set to Mahler's Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). A dozen Rambert dancers performed it with dynamic precision and feeling, enhanced by Finley's warm baritone.

Finley's rich, subtle delivery also served Kim Brandstrup's Songs of a Wayfarer, a Rambert premiere. Brandstrup offered an elliptical essay on intimacy and resistance with fast-spun but spatially finessed movement staged between a scrim and designer Steven Scott's wall of Rothko-esque illuminated panels.

Peter Darrell's Five Ruckert Songs completed the somber, sensitive evening. As the glamorous but haunted central figure, Angela Towler was tremendous, no more so than in a climactic soliloquy requiring both exceptional vulnerability and skill. This was dancing to swoon over. Pity about Yolanda Sonnabend's overdone new costumes--their opulence sometimes overshadowed the choreography's hazy lyricism.

Akram Khan speaks of his work as a "confusion" of contemporary dance and kathak. His ma (Hindi for "mother" and "earth") is an intense consciousness-raiser about humanity's sustaining yet precarious relationship with the land. Framed by white sandbags anchoring thin, heaven-bound wires, Khan and six dancers spiraled and whipped through space like human rotary blades. Their floor-hugging series of rolls, tumbles, and slides exploded with animalistic virtuosity. A lulling mid-section provided dynamic balance, with clustered dancers rippling slowly beneath a radiantly lit fog.

An almost constant pulse of music accompanies ma--superb vocals, oceanic cello, verbal percussion. Khan also flirts with text--a tale from his childhood, sweetly delivered, and a cute mini-fable for two women who speak while each stands inverted on one leg.

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the most stellar member of Alain Platel's Belgian company Les Ballets C de la B, brought Tempus Fugit, which revolves loosely around the concept of time. Beneath a marvelous grove of tall poles topped by silver leaves, ten dancers and three musicians passed through moods and motions from bounding, folk-based steps to a Bollywood parody to a mouth-to mouth tango. The piece is loaded with ambition but too long, and saddled with welcome but scattershot humor. But it contains beautiful, breathtaking moments of delicacy and prowess, both aural and physical.

Emio Greco mines deeply a fairly narrow rarge of movement--riddled with tics but viscerally arresting. The festival's biggest dance risk was his and Pieter C. Scholten's new staging of Orfeo ed Euridice with Britain's Opera North. Their ambiguous take on the admirably simple 1762 version of Gluck's gloomy glory possessed integrity and power, despite questionable design choices (e.g., a chorus of 32 Elizabeth Taylor clones swanning around as if at an awards ceremony in limbo). The dancing was layered into a musically satisfying, dramatically articulate performance. It began strongly with a twitchy yet laser-like solo from Greco, restrained at the hips by Claire Ormshaw's excellent Amore, and finished with a heart stopping coda that pushed the opera to the edge of an abyss.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

www.eif.co.uk

Also, a review of the Edinburgh Fringe appears on our Web site at www.dancemagazine.com.