Edinburgh International and Fringe Festivals.

Various venues Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom August 4-31, 2002

Continental dance darlings Boris Charmatz, hailing from France, and Emio Greco, an Italian based in The Netherlands, offer a scintillating contrast. Like a bright, appealing child, the former is constantly searching for new forms of expression. Working closely with director Pieter C. Scholten, the latter keeps digging deeper and deeper into a visceral, peculiarly personal aesthetic.

With such card-carrying members of the postmodern avant-garde on hand, Edinburgh International Festival Director Brian McMaster could hardly be accused of pandering to die-hard dance traditionalists. For further insight into how radical his choices have become, add Japanese Renaissance man Saburo Teshigawara, plus Jan Fabre's unconventional Swan Lake for the Royal Ballet of Flanders. McMaster's most classical programming was a three-day blitz of Indian dance recitals.

Touted by McMaster as "probably the most elitist show yet produced by the festival," Charmatz's heatre-elevision playfully questions what we expect from theater, television, dance, and ourselves. The fifty-two-minute "pseudo-performance" ran daily, early morning until late night, for one audience member at a time. Each spectator lay upon a faux piano positioned beneath a television. Trapped inside the TV set like asylum inmates, a group of unitard-clad dancers grunted and grimaced through a series of silly-strange vignettes. Meanwhile, in the room itself, music and sound shifted through various speakers, and lighting changes issued from all directions. The experience was intense and relaxing, disorienting yet delightful, and, with no one else to bounce off of, entirely subjective.

Charmatz's generous, amused spirit pervaded Statuts, an international collection of performances, films, and installations that he curated. Loaded with irony and discovery, the event looked in myriad ways at how the human body is represented and perceived. The high spots were Gilles Touyard's boyishly daring Short Cycle With Spin Dry, in which Charmatz and former figure skater Eric Martin tried balancing on circular platforms that spun in time to a washing machine's motor, and the European conceptualist group Superamas's blissfully cosmic digital light show, Digging up.

The festival's underlying theme--the elemental opposition between light and dark--played out in numerous ways. Featuring a plethora of masterly lighting effects and set pieces, Teshigawara's two-act Luminous only gained cohesion in the gimmick-free home stretch. After a long, mesmerizing solo, the apparently boneless Teshigawara was joined by Stuart Jackson, a young man born blind. The pair--one highly trained, the other "uncorrupted" by technique or vanity--achieved a shared ecstasy in movement that was uplifting to see.

Greco's and Scholten's Conjunto di NERO (The Conjunction of Black) successfully translated Greco's uniquely nervous yet bold style to a mixed ensemble of five, including him. Abetted by stunning lighting, the dancing erupted from tense stillness into sweeping convulsions. The net effect was of a cataclysmic probe inside a mysterious heart of darkness. Its companion piece, Rimasto Orfano (Abandoned Orphan), a stark ensemble drama of perplexed, head-wagging fury and collapsing anguish, was a harder nut to crack. But credit must go to Greco and Scholten, in their third consecutive festival visit, for developing both their rigorous work and a Scottish fan base to go with it.

The festival's Indian contingent triumphed in spite of--or perhaps because of--its old-fashioned lecture-demonstration setup. Most of the artists involved were well-established, middle-aged practitioners. This was the official face of classical Indian dance. Little effort was made to place the country's richly varied dance heritage in a contemporary context. However, by highlighting similarities and differences between dance forms, the six programs effectively blended entertainment and education. Mimetic storytelling, often stemming from a religious impulse, took precedence over abstract movement. Yet in each presentation there was ample room for displays of textured rhythms and virtuosity, and the level of musicianship was consistently high. In a cultural package that included kathak, manipuri, odissi, and mohiniattam, top marks could be shared between the exquisite bharata natyam performer Malavika Sarukkai and kuchipudi couple Raja and Radha Reddy, whose flawed yet still splendid brand of dance-drama was situated somewhere between sculpture and silent-film technique.

McMaster's most challenging choices found their greatest Fringe counterpart at Aurora Nova, a two-venue, eleven-nation roster of visual theater and dance that deservedly won a clutch of awards. In Monsoon, France's Compagnie au Cul du Loup conjured a gorgeous, delicate magic out of motion matched to a range of unusual, handmade instrumental objects. Nats Nus (Spanish for "born naked") presented Artistic Director Toni Mira's Ful. Five monoliths, one for each dancer, comprised the endlessly reinvented set for an accomplished, engaging group portrait of modern life. America's Jess Curtis/Gravity Physical Entertainment teamed up with Potsdam's Fabrikcompanie in the resonant Fallen. Brazilian choreographer Lia Rodrigues's Such Stuff As We Are Made Of required enormous commitment and energy from dancers and audience alike. The two halves of this promenade performance were a beautiful fit. In the first, seven nude cast members turned themselves into corporeal trompe l'oeil. After simply exposing themselves to our collective gaze, they flopped like wet fish into and out of a body pileup unsettlingly reminiscent of Holocaust imagery. Part two was a charged, clothed, and slogan-filled parade of dance-y, but not fancy, military maneuvers. The end result was a strong, direct, and reverberant statement about flesh and politics.