Dance People
Edinburgh International Festival
★★★★★

THERE’s a bit of waiting around, kettled at one end of the Old University Courtyard: High Georgian I believe — a grand public space that bears no trace of modernity. We clock the epic historic hermetic. We know we will be on our feet a couple of hours and that we will feature somehow in the EIF promenade show Dancing People.

Members of Omar Rajeh’s Lebanese-French troupe Maqamat mingle, make eye contact, shake hands and chattily ensure we know some ground rules. At the cut of a cordon, we mill into the open space and become a part of it.

There’s some great music given by Mathias Delplanque/Ziad El Ahmadie/Abdul Kharim Chaar, a live string instrument against a layered soundscape. Red envelopes are handed out. This is purely a visual flourish until you decide to get involved.

I opened one, to discover hideous testament about a metro worker cleaning blood off a station platform during violent civil unrest. A fellow punter offered a swap; hence I realised there was more than one upsetting message. Perhaps each envelope contained a different story.

Primed en-masse with miserable fact, a more ushered set-up ensued, and glamorous people danced lyrically, getting into their joyous beat. There was no clue about the motivation of their moves. It was all just actual. Self-divided, I registered quality choreography but couldn’t forget what was in my pocket.

I could see punters being encouraged. The beat became insidious. At the grab of a hand, I gave way totally, becoming a swift side-stepper and a running chain-link in a serpentine extravaganza. Sudden subsequent cleverness found us corralled, looking up at projected instructional words, whilst listening to calls to people from diverse walks of life who then entered the space – yes, there was a doctor in the house – and clear patterns emerged in the deft manoeuvres of this creative enterprise.

Statistics of citizens – their simple existence and place — chimed with conflagrations of vividly danced self-determination. With immediacy, a man doffed fashionable gear, and his fabulous edgy solo dance began. To somebody like me, his body took on the lucid but mysterious etch of Farsi script. Others joined. There was not unison, instead the stark individuality of each dancer made for a heightened unity.

Dancing People employs a leap-frog structure — an outcome of collaboration between co-artistic director Mia Habis, dramaturg Peggy Olislaegers, Rajeh himself and a broad team of multimedia collaborators — that is wise and destabilising, pulling us out of a habitual demeanour via abrupt switches of perspective in our dance, in our quandary, in this quadrangle.

The performers live and breathe with this work. Incredible really, with such skill and timing, on a first night. At home, extracts from my envelope message are as follows: “We felt the ground hum under our feet. I read somewhere that this war will reshape the region. I just want to get through tomorrow” — sourced by Human Rights Watch and Medecins sans Frontiers.

Dance People runs until August 10. Tickets: eif.co.uk