DANCE / Without contraries is no progression: Judith Mackrell on a fusion of pastiche and invention, the courtly and the contemporary, from the Mark Morris Dance Group in Edinburgh

IT IS the contradiction and incongruities, the fusing of extremes, that signal the peculiar individuality of Mark Morris's talent. As a performer, he will take a curtain call with the flamboyance of a Russian ballerina, then totally undermine the grand gesture by absently wiping his nose on his sleeve. As a choreographer, he mixes the casual vernacular of late 20th-century dance with an easy absorption of past tradition (Duncan, Expressionism, Graham and Balanchine). And as an artist, he possesses a kind of chameleon sensibility, abrasively urban, mischievously ersatz while capable of exploring passions and states that are neither modern nor particularly fashionable.

Take Three Preludes, set to Gershwin's music for piano, which is the second piece in a packed and captivating programme at the Playhouse. This is a solo for Morris in which he looks totally of the moment - wearing shoulder-length curly hair and silky Isaac Mizrahi suit, and making clipped, syncopated gestures that suggest post-body- popping robotics. After a moment, you realise that Morris is doing a sort of tap dance with his hands and that deft footwork and debonair turns are turning this into a homage to Fred Astaire. What is more, the voluptuous incline of Morris's body and the springiness of his steps look just like Ginger Rogers. So that, in a manner that is part pastiche, part pure invention, you see Morris striving to distil the sparring wit and the ecstasy of Fred and Ginger dancing together in one.

Vivaldi wouldn't recognise as dance much of the choreography that has been set to his Gloria in D. The wrestling duets, the splayed wooden limbs, the hefty manoeuvres have nothing to do with the courtly brilliance of the early 18th century. Yet in this profoundly religious piece there is a humility and a sense of man's spiritual burden that are far closer to then than now. Morris's dancers don't lark around to Vivaldi's immensely danceable music; they worm and judder close to the floor, they fall grievingly into each other's arms, they dance teeteringly on the brink. One woman runs headlong across the stage in a state of divine terror, her arms windmilling to sustain her precarious balance. A single man flails and slumps in solitary anguish as the rest of the dancers march heedlessly past. When the company soar with the hope of salvation they leap with heads averted and skip with eyes downcast, never daring to claim their fate entirely as their own.

Morris matches movement to music here with a raw but never predictable immediacy and the whole of the programme displays a musicality that is deeply, if sometimes brashly, personal. In Polka, set to Lou Harrison's duo for violin and piano, the whole company stomps the stage in a grotesque war dance. The dance rhythms pound out the metrics of the music in what seems like brutish imitation - in fact Morris is winding up the joint energy of movement and score to a glorious, impossible high. There is a moment when the dancers circle into an ever-tightening knot which generates such intensity of activity that you feel the whole churning mass of bodies might simply start to levitate.

One of the many beauties of Bedtime, set to three Schubert Lieder, is the way Morris sets up waves of movement that seem to ride the music forever. One dancer after another picks up on some wide circling gesture so that the original impulse spins effortlessly out over the long romantic lines of Schubert's melody. In the duet Beautiful Day, the dancers' bodies angle and fold in shapes that image exactly the exquisite geometries of the accompanying Bach cantata. In all six pieces it is hard to say whether Morris is motivated more by love for music or for dance - the addictive thing about his work is that it radiates so avid and so unselfconscious a passion for both.