Wee Man by Barrowland Ballet (⭑⭑⭑⭑☆) unleashes Scottish masculinity; a contingent that obliges a swagger, albeit weighed down with oat-filled sporrans and performatively knitted brows. Wee Man begins with an inventory of ground rules that ring true and are jocular. A good old crash-around ensues and this is dramatically beautiful and entertaining.

Choreographer Natasha Gilmore animates her mixed cast of resilient males with due flair. Clearly these gents all have to be fit, be they stocky or more gnarled.

In a torrent of graphic projection — devised by Niall Walker — and a riff of collectively devised live utterance, we clock how blokes aren’t allowed favourite colours or salads, how failure to be butch is only ever a matter of not trying hard enough, how attire is necessarily monochrome except for a garish novelty sock.

Wee Man cadences with full-on brotherhood and enacts a postscript where the core dancers engage a prepared community of fellows, plucking them from a front row, into a massive swirl of airborne bonding.

Glasgow-based Barrowland Ballet have a track-record of bringing communities to this kind of place. In Wee Man we also witness episodes of sadistic backslapping, plus dehumanising instances of victimisation.

Then there’s a unique illumination when the older men (kitted in navy) torture the youth (in aqua) with poyims they know — evocatively worded by Kevin P Gilday. After a truculent fret, the adolescents take on the poetic speech pattern with their own innate ease.

Afterward, as the youngest and smallest is tossed around like a rag and dumped lifeless, we realise how this scene will have been cathartic to devise and rehearse. Yes, there’s a hideous shouty humiliation going on, but the learned manoeuvre is manifold — a potentially life-enhancing game of trust, if only enjoyment were allowed be central. But allowed by whom?

Letting themselves into fulsome self-nurture, seasoned Scotland-based dance artists Merav Israel and Claire Pencak perform Fields (⭑⭑⭑⭑☆) in which an unpromising heap of small rocks is transformed into indication, motivation and landscape.

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This feels like a key episode within a massive practice. Immersed in their task of organising and inhabiting this shifting field — its beguiling chatter and rumble blurring with Nick Paget-Thomson’s electronic soundscape — the duo move with a deft improvised brilliance that is so various, so dynamic and so unencumbered by physical conventions as to be quintessential; vital in its way.

Fizz fizz, patter patter patter, layer, slather, pulse pulse, vex and bedazzle, Wendy Houstoun has hit town with her one-woman show Watch it! (⭑⭑⭑⭑☆) in which her multimedia impulses function with the precision of vintage engineering. Think cherished Morris Minor, with daemonic go-faster stripes.

Watch it! is a dance of perpetual vibration and oscillating thought. It is also great entertainment. Crisp monologue abounds with mordant conclusions: as our cultural consortia insist, we just have to laugh, albeit mirth off-the-cuff may give way to handcuff before you can say JK Rowling.

Rear-grounded by the projection of her portrait a la Andy Warhol (that arch-borrower) Houstoun surprises with an original song about ownership, while donning and doffing a washable scarlet flag/sari appropriated (OK, stolen) from a supportive institution.

Earlier she organ-harvests an Englishman Irishman Scotsman joke, hazarding that they need not be men/have nationalities/be going to a bar/be walking. Her stage-by-stage offensive content/context-ectomy invokes the clean abstraction we thought we had invited. From this abyss she brings us back into her conceptual two-step and other fancy footwork. Finally our heroine pays homage to a particular performer — the late, great Nigel Charnock — and illustrates how his kind of fearlessness is fugitive. Grab this and hold fast.

Wee Man runs until August 17. Tickets: assemblyfestival.com.
Fields (Extract) runs until August 24. Tickets: assemblyfestival.com.
Watch it! runs until until August 24. Tickets: zoofestival.co.uk.