THE first thing we are told of Grupo Corpo dance company (★★★) is that it is legendary. Not so at The Playhouse Theatre (Edinburgh International Festival) where, needs must, the troupe became actual to its well-behaved mature audience. 

Hailing from Brazil, Grupo Corpo’s numerous dancers are fabulously adept and committed. They elegantly embody healthy bravura, free pelvic gyration and richly fluid co-ordination. It is phenomenal to witness two or more of these dancers throwing swift complexity in tight collegiate imitation. It’s also perennial. In the main, the choreographic draughtsmanship of Rodrigo Pederneiras distributes these bodies uniformly across the vast stage space and I too felt equidistance, amid a short ration of cardinal events that I could home in on or rebound from.

Two substantial dances were given. They explored synchronised duets and pack sequences, with the full company massing to pull out all the stops with closing unison moments. Proliferation is thus unveiled and part of us knows this to be existentially tragic (don’t mention the rainforest) even where positive images are offered. 

Part one, Gil Refazendo, with music by Gilberto Gil, foregrounds set-designer Paulo Pederneiras’s backdrop projection of a massive sunflower head, dead at first, but reversing back to life: seen in close-up, and eventually amid its myriad mates when the camera finally zooms out.

Veg out and you miss it, but there was an episode of enacted (and synchronised) copulation (pollination?) though the troupe’s fine pyjamas were not doffed.

The body group take a pew for act two, Gira, taking turns to rise and emerge, through equidistant slits in a rood-screen of black drapes, out into a stage arena eerily lit by Gabriel Pederneiras. It’s a tribute to the brilliant dynamism of the dancing that we are essentially up for more, from an unchanged physical and choreographic source. 

However, Gira does advance a more distinct episode of fertility/copulation images — less synchronised now, and more sculpturally inventive. Is it in the apparently effortless nature of dance accomplishment that such episodes become reasonless and even joyless. In the end, I zoomed out, wondering whether ritual (an EIF ’24 buzzword) automatically resides in a place where our strangeness settles with going through the motions.

Over at The Lyceum, Edinburgh’s pocket opera house, Leicester’s own Aakash Odedra Company (★★★) offered a world premiere, though newness is apparently not a concern in their production of Songs of the Bulbul — nor the Bulbul’s actual birdsong; its lyrical content ceding instead to Sufi symbolism. With a shower of petals, a blast of strobe, and an adroit puff of smoke, durable stagecraft underpins all. 

The curtain goes up on birth: things go well: things go less well: things perk up: death intervenes. This is all a bit of an old chestnut, but I was somehow riveted. Mr Odedra, our sole performer, embodies a Kathak form, as choreographed here by Rani Khanam.

Herewith the internal charge of a multi-speed centrifuge, spinning abundant content from the dancer’s interior, taking him to a frictionless state of prolonged shapeshift and lightness of limb. Variation flows: there is never a moment lacking in resource or meaning.

I chose to get absorbed in visual witness of the dance by tuning out the more overt (or corny?) cinematic gestures of Rushil Rangan’s amplified orchestral score and by ignoring the interior design aesthetic perceptible in Emanuele Salamanca’s stage setting. 

Art festival success at this echelon probably necessitates a kind of global taste level. It would be a mistake to seek stark innovation in this setting. We won’t find hammer and tongs in the linen drawer.

Run ended.