Scottish Dance Theatre are the biggest name on the programme: through their presence at the Fringe every year, and a relentless touring programme, the Dundee dancers have blazed a trail for contemporary dance. Led by artistic director Janet Smith, their mission seems to be to bring contemporary work to a wider public. Double bill The Life and Times of Girl A and NQR  is a typical combination of serious content – NQR stands for Not Quite Right, a medical term for those who don’t fit preconceived ideas of normality – and accessible choreography. 

Janis Claxton’s work is surprisingly playful: over the past few years, she has been concentrating on the idea of the human as an animal: for the Fringe 2008, this involved capturing dancers in Enclosure 44 of Edinburgh Zoo, while Torque set animal gestures to the score of Bach’s Partita #2.  Having recently toured China with an iteration of Human Animal – like Enclosure 44 it is a durational and site-responsive piece – she has moved from being one of Scotland’s rising stars to a strong international export.

Both Curious Seed and Room 2 Manoeuvre debuted their current shows at Dance Base in 2009: Curious Seed’s Found won a Herald Angel, while Tony Mill’s warning about the dangers of television has been touring consistently for the past eighteen months. While Mill’s Watch It! is a solo, Found is a fascinating collaboration between choreographer Christine Devaney and  musician/author Luke Sutherland. With live music, passages of speech alongside the dance, it represents a fine example of “dance theatre”, moving beyond the expected patterns of dance into a more immediate and direct style of performance.

PlanB’s revival of A Wee Home From Home proves how a work can retain its relevance, and popularity, even after twenty years. Another example of “dance theatre”, it works as a duet between dancer Frank McConnell and musician Michael Marra. Dealing with alienation and the problems of coming home to “Mother Glasgow”, it retains a certain poignancy, even though its vision of Scottishness belongs to an earlier era.  Directed by Communicado’s Gerry Mulgrew, it brings together  something of a performance supergroup and is recommended for its easy fusion of Marra’s stripped down melancholy and McConnell’s hyperkinetic movement.