Dance at the 2015 Edinburgh Festival

Posted on March 18, 2015

The Edinburgh International Festival has announced its 2015 programme. Dance highlights include Sylvie Guillem, Israel Galván, Zürich Ballet and Les Ballets C de la B. This year’s festival runs from August 7 to 31.

Les Ballet C de la B dance Alain Platel and Frank Van Laecke’s En Avant, Marche!, a work which starts in the rehearsal room of an amateur brass band in Flanders. Ballet Am Rhein dance Martin Schläpfer’s Seven, set to Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. Guillem performs her farewell show, Sylvie Guillem – Life in Progress, while Galván dances Lo Real, which explores the plight of the Roma and Sinti peoples in fascist Spain in the 1930s and 1940s.

Zürich Ballet perform a double bill of company director Christian Spuck’s Sonett (pictured) which uses speech and music by Mozart and Philip Glass to explore Shakespeare’s sonnets, and Wayne McGregor’s Kairos, set to Max Richter’s reimagining of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons with designs by Idris Khan. TAO Dance Theatre perform Weight x 3, created by its founder Tao Ye to music by Steve Reich.

Richter will also perform his Vivaldi work in concert with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, while Sufjan Stevens, another composer whose music has been used for dance, will also appear at the Festival. There’s also a dance element in a new production of Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro, conducted by Iván Fischer with choreography by Veronika Vámos. Visit www.eif.co.uk for more information.

Picture: Zürich Ballet in Sonett. Photograph: Judith Schlosser

Zoe Anderson

Zoë was born in Edinburgh, and saw her first dance performances at the Festival there. She is the dance critic of The Independent, and has also written for The Independent on Sunday, The Scotsman and Dancing Times. In 2002, she received her doctorate from the University of York for a thesis on “Nationhood and epic romance: Ariosto, Sidney, Spenser”. She is the author of The Royal Ballet: 75 Years and The Ballet Lover’s Companion.