Martian moves

Every August when London dims, Edinburgh calls, promising nothing less than ‘the greats of the arts’ at the International Festival. As if this beautiful, haunting city wasn’t enough enticement, I always pack high expectations for the EdFest, which in the past has delivered some staggeringly good international dance events that commercially biased London could not entertain. Though in recent years things have gone off a bit, this year the ‘great’ box was ticked several times.

Israel Galván’s mesmerisingly extraterrestrial flamenco dancing has been seen in London before. But this 110-minute fantasy on the fate of gipsies under Hitler, Lo Real (The Real), built the explosive bebop of his dancing into a much larger landscape using folk memory to unlock a feast of musical and dancing exploration.

Galván is very strangely wired — skinny and beaky, he moves with the suddenness of electrical circuits shorting, with totally unpredictable jags and stabs of legs and hands. His sense of rhythm seems beamed in from another galaxy, but is well understood by the adventurous performers around him. An old piano got punishingly kicked, pebbles stood in for castanets, a saxophone swooped and fluttered about as if trying to find a note somewhere, and a huge old lady performed a funny flamenco parody of an American TV commercial. Railway girders, Leni Riefenstahl film and metal walls became the percussive arsenal of anger, surtitles showed us the distilled power of the lyrics as a voice wailed: ‘Huge tiredness came over me and I felt a great desire to cry.’

Galván’s female counterpart was Belén Maya, a revelatory dancer of dark, defiant sadness, dressed like a Roma woman in headscarf, clogs and leggings, sledgehammering in the big wooden shoes, then kicking them off and repeating the zapateado in bare, unprotected feet.