Dance

Celebrating its 40th birthday (and a new £11 million Glasgow home), it is timely indeed for Scottish Ballet to be invited back to the EIF with a triple bill spanning 60 years of classical ballet and contemporary dance.

Walking down to my seat in the front stalls, I quickly see that the Playhouse is packed up to the Gods.

Although listed under Dance in the Fringe programme, this is not a dance performance per se, but more of a dramatised play with film, music and short dance sequences. This devised theatrical piece based on Titanic survivors' stories is performed by a group of six young dance and performing arts students.

The title and starting point for this new work by Norwegian choreographer, Ina Christel Johannessen, is a gothic story by Polish writer and artist Bruno Schulz. Set in a strange house with a maze of forgotten rooms, it describes images of shadows above the lampshade, ghostlike shoots and branches and dark smiling mouths.

It's not every day that you see almost completely naked performers pull pieces of chocolate out from between their pants and crotch and offer this not quite so tempting where-have-they-been-morsels

The Italian dance company Kataklo give an exciting and incredibly agile performance which holds the audience enthralled right through their performance.

Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is a tale of the obsessive need to remain youthful and how a soul can be corrupted when that person no longer accepts the disfigurement

This is fantastically exciting show which no one should miss!

Before I begin, let me confess something - ever since someone brought me back a set of castanets from a Spanish holiday when I was a little girl, I've been drawn to flamenco.

It was at the EIF 2005, when Scottish Ballet, revamped and revitalised under artistic director Ashley Page, performed a luscious programme of Balanchine classics, proving it was now a world class dance company.

It is good that contemporary dance continues to evolve and certainly ‘On Danse’ is an extraordinary innovative multi-media production. The music is that of the 18th century composer Jean-Phillipe Rameau but the production is most assuredly 2lst century.

It's easy to forget the Edinburgh International Festival - the original "Edinburgh Festival" - in the hurly burly of the Fringe. The EIF kind of merges into the landscape, as literally thousands of Fringe performers turn the city into a giant theatrical playground.