Edinburgh Fringe v. International: Dancing through the dark

It doesn't look like a great year for dance at the International Festival, but the Fringe is taking up the slack, says John Percival

That magic name Swan Lake is guaranteed to sell ballet tickets. No surprise, then, that it features prominently in the dance programme of this year's Edinburgh International Festival. But there are several surprising things about this production.

First, it is the only classical ballet included this year, so ballet fans get a mere five days during the whole three-week festival. Second, the company performing it is not exactly one of the most famous. Some of us know the Royal Ballet of Flanders as a lively and homogeneous group of well-trained dancers, but there are only 54 of them, which is rather few for this work. And it isn't by chance that no stars are named in the publicity – it's because their leading dancers, although able enough, are not widely known outside Belgium.

Surprise number three is the name of the producer: Jan Fabre, who is primarily known as a visual artist and a theatre man. The work we have seen from him has been avant-garde to the point of outrageousness. I don't want to judge his take on the ballet before seeing it; maybe the "wealth of medieval Flemish symbolism and imagery" he is said to have drawn upon will prove apt and illuminating (although I wonder how he has managed to bring in a plague doctor as one of the characters). But it is bound to give a decidedly unusual picture of the famous love story.

That must be exactly what the International Festival's director Brian McMaster wants. He defines his main theme this year as a celebration of the diversity of creative endeavour through innovative artistic projects, and in the process, dance, to some extent, gets stood on its head.

The most attractive prospect on offer is a new production, Luminous, by the Japanese choreographer Saburo Teshigawara: another creator who is radical in his use of light, sound and objects, but always, in the past, with excellent dancing too. On the other hand, the prospect of six different kinds of entirely conventional Indian dance crammed into one weekend seems more educational than artistic, and certainly not innovative; while the other "dance" events range from a one-hour, one-spectator-at-a-time piece on video to a group of independently conceived installations, performances and films by 17 different artists presented together to challenge "our perception of how we perceive art".

But can McMaster be entirely blamed if what many people think of as real dance is played down this year? For two years running he brought us one of the world's great companies, New York City Ballet, first with many of its acknowledged masterworks, then with a selection of recent creations. The grudging and sometimes ill-informed reactions of critics from some national papers can hardly have encouraged the festival director, or his audience, to persevere with such presentations.

The days when Edinburgh regularly brought three major (but often unfamiliar) companies for a week each have long gone, and the costs of that are likely to prevent any return. Anyway, I suspect McMaster just wouldn't be interested. By experience and inclination he is more an opera man, and his one big contribution to dance came about when he wanted to present Tchaikovsky's two last theatre works as they were first conceived, on a double bill: the rarely performed opera Iolanta with the ubiquitous ballet The Nutcracker. For the latter he commissioned a new production from Matthew Bourne, whose company Adventures in Motion Pictures was then a small experimental group, which McMaster had seen and liked. The idea seemed crazy, but it worked, and the success of that Nutcracker was the making of Bourne's career, leading to his other big ballets (Swan Lake, Cinderella, The Car Man etc).

Later, inviting the American choreographer Mark Morris to bring his company for repeated visits did a lot to build up Morris's present high reputation in Britain. So the official festival has certainly done dance some good during McMaster's regime and, if we are lucky, it could do so again despite what looks like dumbing down this year.

Meanwhile on the Fringe, where dance offerings used to be almost invariably dire, seems (at least on paper) to have found some more interesting possibilities. There had been very occasional exceptions in the past (I remember for instance the first sight of Extemporary Dance, which went on to become a very respectable company), but more than one show forced me to slip quietly away at the intermission, or even without waiting so long.

The problem is that, for the most part, you have to guess from a few words in the Fringe guide whether a hitherto unknown group holds any hope of proving worthwhile. There are a few shows returning after past successes, or for which the scale or nature of the production gives rise to more confidence. The Chinese State Circus is one such, where you know that there must be some spectacular acrobatics, juggling and the like.

Another pretty sure bet is Derevo, a company founded in St Petersburg but now based in Dresden. Award-winners in earlier festivals, they call their new show La Divina Commedia. That gives little away and advance reports do not make its relevance too clear, but there is apparently a ring-master in the cast, so one can hope for liveliness at the very least.

Alas, my colleague Nadine Meisner has snaffled those two, and some of the Fringe shows I have picked for my own visits, relying as much on hunch as knowledge, are bound to prove disappointing, but that's the nature of the game. At least my heart does not entirely sink at the prospect of a crammed long weekend, even though I think the official International Festival could have tried harder and more imaginatively to exhilarate me.