The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 44

44 THKOBSKRVKR EDINBURGH FESTIVAL. SUNDAY 22 AUGUST 1 993 Dance Jann Parry Spellbound in a sports stadium secure. Love in a time of Aids cannot be invincible. This work's radical surprise is that couples actually waltz together, in a delirium of pleasure. The three-quarter lilt is catching, passed from hand to hand like a ball or a fever.

It is an enchantment a spell, which is the title of the newest work in the programme, set to four Shakespeare songs. Morris himself appears, a buxom, roguish Cupid in pink tunic and wings, sorting out the troubles of two rustic lovers. They mimic the extravagant sentiments of the songs until love overtakes them, in a duet that doesn't quite come off. Its awkwardness seems unintentional, unfinished. 'Mosaic and United' gets a more polished performance than Baryshnikov Group was able to give it in London earlier this year.

It is a Rubik cube of a piece, setting out different facets of string quartets by Henry Cowell. The choreographer parses the music's structures, repeating when it does, twisting the dance phases so that they recur at an unfamiliar angle. What appeared to be five successive solos turn out, on closer examination, to be just two, made strange by different bodies, other inflexions. The building blocks are spare, the interlocking combination wonderfully intricate. Decoding the puzzle is simply a matter of looking and listening yet the piece never loses its sinister mystery.

The music trills along the nerve; the stargazing performers shudder, expecting a shower of meteorites to fall into their laps or strike the back of their necks. Morris Dancing can knock you out, as ecstatic Festival audiences have discovered. MARK MORRIS has provided the best possible advertisement for contemporary dance, with two programmes that have made his group the hottest ticket in town. Some 8,000 people will have seen the six performances by tomorrow night. Word travels fast that his dancers induce a state of bliss that can be enjoyed by everyone.

No need to worry whether it's safe to laugh: inhibitions soon fall away, faced with such infectious, unpretentious dancing. The last-minute change of venue from the fire-damaged Playhouse Theatre to the Mea-dowbank Sports Stadium has been an advantage. The atmosphere is informal, democratic: games players toting sports bags mingle with the interval crowd. The impromptu stage a lino dance floor laid over a badminton court is so capacious that the dancers can keep running flat out into the black draped wings. There was an impressive line-up of singers and musicians for the two sets of Brahms's 'Love Song Waltzes' in the first programme: Amanda Roocroft, Felicity Palmer, John Mark Ainsley and Thomas Allen, with the company's musical director, Linda Dowdell, joined at the piano by Malcolm Martineaux.

The distinctive, contrasting voices gradually became indistinguishable from the dancing body. Waltzes, after all, are a fusion of music and movement. Morris combines heavenly and earthly associations in choreography so apparently artlessly that anyone could do it. It is much like the way the Scots dance once lubricated by a drop or two. A local nurse, who had never before seen contemporary dance, understood perfectly what Morris was up to.

She knew what it felt like to be swung off her feet, to be passed down a chain of swirling figures, to reel deliriously out of control (expect that Morris's dancers never quite lose control). She also recognised 'horizontal dancing', introduced to Scotland by Bill Forsyth's film Gregory's Girl. In it, the young couple lie on their backs, disco-dancing to imagined music. Morris's version manages to be both innocent and lubricious, two backs and eight limbs moving in three-quarter time. The opening work, 'New Love Song Waltzes' (to Brahms's Op 65) is remarkable for using virtually no waltz steps throughout the cycle of 15 songs.

It starts with an Isadora figure (Ruth Davidson) tossed on the seas of passion, strong white thighs gleaming among waves of dancers in blue and black. For much of the time, they are linked in trios, quartets or a hand-holding line; if they pair off it is not for long. In song eight for example, 'Dreaming, by the world forgot', stranded bodies roll into Davidson, Mark Morris and Guillermo Resto perform 'A Spell' in Meadowbank Staduim.Photograph by Richard Mildenhall. Morris dancing: Ruth each other, start awake and change partners, trying any combination of genders. A canon of love-struck individuals fling up their arms before being cast down, wracked by desire.

Lifts, more like heaves, are Three Graces, sophisticated in their simplicity. Morris has a gift for exits and endings. 'New Love Song Waltzes' closes with a spiral of bodies lying down in sequence, with Ruth Davidson the fast one upright in their centre. Even as she sinks with the light, a woman on the periphery starts upwards: the cycle continues. 'Love Song Waltzes', sweeter and sadder, concludes the programme with a solitary figure Music Andrew Porter Cinema Philip French Early Italian, early Scot (Keith Sabado) suddenly bereft.

He has been handed a long chain of dancers, swirling from one to another until there is no one left to hold him. The cycle is broken just when the community of 12 seemed at its most Chinese tenor, gave pleasure by purity and focus of tone and in some melting moments reminiscent of his master, Bergonzi. But he was unspontaneous, unstirring. Katerina Kudriav-chenko, the soprano, had spirit in an obvious sort of way, plenty of vocal heft, a technique faulty though not negligible. Ashley Martin-Davis's costumes were Edwardian.

His set was a evocation of the Piazzetta, with pop-up chairs to turn it into a council chamber. In motion they looked silly; so did flying coat-hangers carrying robesfor the chprus. 1 r- Howard Davies's production was inexpert in the.natter of placing singers where their music tells (Deng went upstage for the second verse of his caba-letta); often the principals plomped down on the floor in awkward postures. But there was nothing that editing couldn't put right before the show, a co-production with the Royal Opera, comes to Covent Garden. There the wardrobe will no doubt supply more pleasing carnival costumes.

MacMillan, born in 1959, came to prominence at the 1990 Proms with The Confession of Isobel Gowdie. Since then he has been prolific. Three chamber operas and a new trumpet concerto are among the 18 works billed at the festival at the King's, the Queen's Hall, the Usher Hall, the Traverse and St Giles' Cathedral. Overkill? An opening recital of largely student works seemed unneeded even if the composer, introducing the programme, earnestly advised us that in his 1982 Study on Two Planes we would discover strands of compositional thought and discern aspects of his musical personality relevant to his later compositions. Three Dawn Rituals, a 1983 septet derived from an earlier piece, had piquantly exotic SCHUBERT and Janacek, Verdi, and James MacMillan are the Festival composers.

The first Verdi was Scottish Opera's due Foscari. Verdi proposed the drama of political vendetta (drawn from Byron) to Venice, but descendants of the families concerned still lived there; so he composed it for Rome. The construction (unities observed) is neat. The outer acts are arias in turn for the tenor, the soprano, and the baritone falsely-accused son, indignant wife, grieving father who as Doge must sentence with a duet tpjcjose Act the central act is a of aria, quartet in one sweep, with an ensemble finale. Nothing much happens: the initial situation is sustained until son and then father expire of grief.

But the melodic charge is high, the scoring is delicate and ambitious, and the forms, often unconventional, are secure. This is Verdi's first essay in the intimate, personally passionate vein (every scene but one indoors) that led to La traviata. Richard Armstrong, conducting, brought the opera to life with tense, charged rhythms and incisive instrumental colours. (I'll chide him only for not urging the solo clarinet and the soprano to make more of little notes. 'The semiquavers slow', Verdi wrote in a comparable passage of the Requiem stabs of poignant emotion, not decorative flicks.) Orchestra and chorus were alert, vivid.

Philip Joll was a noble, moving Doge, except when he pushed in the finale. An understudy unready, he sang side-stage, score in hand, in mufti, while onstage Frederick Bur-chinal the rehearsed baritone, but victim of bronchitis mugged. It was Joll who held the eye, for he held the ear by his eloquence. Deng, a singularly named a- homeless young in London. Kate Hardie andAiden Gillen in 'Safe'.

carried out by women and men alike. Clumsiness is a form of tenderness, a proof of trust as well as an absurd way of bundling someone into the wings. Yet a trio of bulky men dancing together can resemble the lady and the buck-toothed Steve Buscemi as a sad con man, who is blown away by cold professional crook, Christopher Lloyd. Buscemi (a gangster in Reservoir Dogs, the creepy bellboy in Barton Fink) has the lead as a depressed would-be moviemaker in Alexander Rockwell's In The Soup, another 'State of Independents' offering. He is clearly becoming the Elisha Cock Jr.

of the Nineties. The vigour of these independent American movies and the crisp professionalism of Hollywood show up a certain tenta-tiveness in much European cinema. There is no question that three intriguing movies I saw in the festival's 'Focus on Scandinavia' strand would have benefitted from greater dynamism and a critical producer's eye brought to bear on narrative logic and character development. Jon Lindstrom's amusing road movie, Dreaming Of Rita, sends three frustrated generations of a Swedish family on a chase from Stockholm to Copenhagen and beyond in search of their hearts' desires. In Veikko Aaltonen's Finnish thriller, The Prodigal Son, a violent ex-convict is manipulated by a sado-masochistic psychiatrist and finds salvation through the love of a bespectacled woman who notices that he, too, needs glasses.

This refutation of Dorothy Parker proceeds in unexpected ways. Gudny Halldorsdottir's The Men's Choir, almost certainly the first movie to be directed by the daughter of a Nobel Prize winner (the 1955 literary laureate, Halldor Laxness), is a light-hearted romp concerning the adventures of an Icelandic choir touring Sweden and Germany. A packed Edinburgh cinema loved this crude, ramshackle comedy, though the ideal audience might be found in the Welsh valleys, which share with the Icelanders a passion for drink, religion, gossip and male-voice choirs. The big disappointment in the 'New British Films' section is David Hayman's The Hawk, a poorly-scripted psychological thriller with a striking performance by Helen Mirren as a Lancashire housewife who suspects her husband (George Cos-tigan) of being a serial killer. It was more than made up for, however, by Safe financed by the BBC and also featuring George Costigan (as the decent, Screen gems on a budget THE organisers of the Edinburgh International Film Festival have sacrificed the possibility of surprise for the certainty of approbation by choosing to open the forty-seventh festival last week with Jane Campion's Piano, the best film shown at Cannes, and to bring down the curtain next Sunday with the second best film in competition at Cannes, Mike Leigh's Naked.

In between, however, the film festival's director, Penny Thompson and her team have arranged a varied and adventurous programme that almost entirely eschews mainstream Hollywood cinema. The only big studio production, The Boy's Life, starring Robert De Niro, was shown as a tribute to a local lad made good, the Brox-burn-born director Michael Ca ton-Jones. The festival's most prominent section, 'Just Do It: Focus on American Low-Budget Film Making' saw movie-makers vying with each other as to who had produced the cheapest picture. The prize for cheapness goes to Michael Almereyda's Another Girl, Another Planet, an indulgent satire on garrulous Greenwich Villagers made with a children's 4200 Fisher Price Pixelvision video camera. Blown up to 16mm, it looks as if it had been shot through a frosted-glass window.

The best movie in the section is El Mariachi (now in London at the Screen on the Green, 15), written, directed, photographed and edited by the 24-year-old Hispanic Texan Robert Rodriguez. This vigorous action movie was shot in single takes in a dusty Mexican border town and turns on a local gang confusing the identities of an invincible killer seeking revenge and a sweet-natured c.c: hi I Tl llll Jipilfll 071928 2252 mraiftn frayed manager of a central London shelter for the homeless young) a 65-minute film directed by Antonia Bird from a screenplay by Al Ashton, with songs by Billy Bragg. This incisive, unflinching account of rootless, unemployed youngsters on the streets of London is as painful as it is honest and offers no easy answers to the crucial issues it raises. Kate Hardie as an abused teenager on the run and Aiden Gillen a deprived young Irishman 'beyond help head an excellent cast. Unlike The Hawk, Safe is designed to go straight on to the small screen, which is both surprising and sad.

It deserves to be seen in cinemas. The Edinburgh Festival began in 1947 as a celebration of documentary cinema, and it was opened by Scotland's greatest film-maker, John Grierson, the man who coined the term 'documentary'. I especially like three documentaries on view this year. Having missed it on television -last month, I was pleased to catch a re-edited version of Barbara Orton and Richard Downes's In Cuba They're Still Dancing, an inspiring movie about a Glaswegian working-class woman's lifelong devotion to radical politics and Latin American dancing. The two come together when the eloquent 70-year-old Agnes MacLean makes her first visit to Cuba.

It is a moving experience and one would dearly like to hear more from Ms MacLean. The other documentaries are American and very different in tone from each other. In Roger Weisberg's Road Scholar, the Romanian-born poet Andrei Codrescu, a deadpan humourist, sympathetic interviewer and sharp social observer, makes a journey from New York to San Francisco in a red Cadillac convertible, 'a car named after the chief of a tribe of American pedestrians'. Allen Ginsberg, who befriended Codrescu when he emigrated to the States in 1966, sees him off from Manhattan, and this funny, affectionate, scathing, quizzical movie is ultimately an affirmative testimony to the variety and continuing promise of American life. In contrast to the highly personal Road Scholar, Frederick Wiseman's Zoo is a characteristically non-judgmental portrait of an American institution, in this case Miami's vast Metro-zoo, by one of the greatest living documentarists.

There is no music or commentary; the animals are not anthropomor-phised; the visitors are not set up as graceless gawpers; a 'Feast With The Beasts' black-tie, fund-raising party does not become an occasion for easy satire. This riveting film draws us into the life of the zoo, and its very length (130 minutes) and lack of sensationalism puts the viewer into a contemplative mood. Not that it is without memorable incident. Among other things, the film observes a rhino giving birth to a stillborn calf and the subsequent open-air autopsy, a team of female vets castrating a wolf, and a hunting party going after a pit bull terrier that has killed two antelopes. This Wednesday, following a festival practice established four years ago, Frederick Wiseman will be conducting a masterclass on documentary at the Cameo Cinema.

It is one of nme such events: other visitors include the designer, Ken Adam and Scorsese's editor, Thelma Schoonmaker. At Cannes, film makers puff their work at press conferences; at Edinburgh they discuss then- art with the movie going public. timbres and turns, and some effective, Messiaen-like irruptions of shrill woodwind. (It was inspired by the Pan chapter of The Wind in the Willows.) The composer's programme, notes tell us what to think: in the sextet The Road to Ardtqlla 'heat, sun, sea, tenderness, peace, green land combine to provide a musical language which is lyrical, gestural, and impressionistic'; his Piano Sonata 'conveys a mood of elegy, of despair and desolation'. These, early pieces were, at least, niore thoroughly composed than Variations, which had its premiere at the Travetste.

It's an soprano-tenor conversation (text by Iain Heggie) about tourists; a fair sample is "The tourist continuesThe tourist proceedsNo plan of actionNo regulationNo superobjec-tiveNo ulterior motive'. On and on it goes, busily declaimed to nondescript, featureless music over sextet accompaniment. Glum and glummer we grow. How can anyone have thought the piece (which is dated 1991) worth bringing to a festival or to any stage? Oh, well: next week I hope I'll have something good to say about MacMillan. Tourist Variations was done on a bill with Craig Armstrong's Anna, text by John Clifford 45 minutes' drivel about a secretary who in encounters with beggar, boss, priest-lover, and angel 'begins to realise that the fulfilment she craves is not found in the mundanities of life'.

A serious subject is trivi-alised by verbal cliche ('Who are the self you never knew') and music (small ensemble, enriched by atmospheric electronics) that veers between minimalism and Lloyd Webber-ish schlock. Anna was slightly the more bearable, in that it had 'singable' vocal lines. Pamela Helen Stephen, a likeable artist, was a heroine with expressive eyes and warm, steady tone. Eirian Davies and Alasdair Elliott, her supporting cast, were the principals of Tourist Variations and win medals for memorising the hour-long banality. Schubert and Janacek are paired in programmes operatic, orchestral, chamber, and solo.

Odd but endearing bedfellows. Between Schubert's E-flat and C-minor sonatas Andras Schiff gave a poetic and beautiful account of Janacek's 1.X.1905 all tenderness and compassion, lacking something of anger and protest, perhaps. His Schubert (on a Bosendorfer) was marvellously sensitive and lyrical, turbulent when apt, never merry. A fourth festival theme is song recitals. Anne Evans gave the first the first, too, of her career.

She chose Berg's Seven Early Songs, the Frauenliebe und -Leben, and Wagner's Wesen-donck lieder. Is it absurd to call a mature soprano, Bayreuth's Briinnhilde, promising? She seemed young, fresh, vulnerable memorable when phrases flowed pure and free, conscientious but vocally ill-at-ease when they did not. Lionel Friend's pianism was plodding. Felicity Lott, in black and glitter, gave the second recital, a late-night Lyceum cabaret (Geoffrey Parsons at the piano): Reynaldo Hahn and Messager delivered with fine-spun, exquisitely audible, cunningly timed pianissimi. Frivolous fare after The Persians, which had filled the theatre just before but captivating.

i Unflinching: An account of the musician seeking work, both of whom dress in black and carry guitar cases containing the tools of their trade. If the film was preserved in amber, some future civilisation could extract from it the DNA of Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah and George Miller and do a Jurassic Park style cloning of A Fistful of Dollars, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Mad Max. But the picture has verve and style, and the story of its making on a budget of $7,000 (partly raised by Rodriguez spending a month as a guinea-pig on a Texas hospital's cholesterol project, where he wrote the script and met his leading actor) is chutzpah with chilli sauce. Another enterprising first feature in the 'Let's Do It' section, writer-director Nick Gomez's Laws Of Gravity (now at the Gate, Notting Hill, COTTESI.OE THEATRE 24, 25 Aug, 2, 3 6 Sep ot 7 7A Ann Sopf ol 2.30pm "50pm An confinuing 18) was shot in Brooklyn for $38,000. The long takes, grainy texture and naturalistic acting give a documentary feel to its tale of two petty thieves getting out of their depth when they start dealing in guns.

It is in an American maverick tradition, initiated in 1960 by John Cassavetes, and is especially indebted to Mean Streets, the seminal movie of Cassavetes's one-time follower Martin Scorsese, though it lacks Scorsese's poetry and moral force. Also consciously deriving from Mean Streets is another New York debut, Rob Weiss's highly accomplished Amongst Friends. Made for a mere $370,000, it centres on three middle-class Long Island high school friends who revolt against their fathers' generation of well-educated professional men in favour of the more exciting lifestyle of their colourful, hustling, semi-criminal, ghetto-reared grandfathers. Like Scorsese in Goodfellas, Weiss explores, in a disturbing manner, the role of crime in American society and the attractions of the criminal life for people neither psychotic nor deprived. In a slightly higher price range, but well below the inflated budgets of the simplest Hollywood movies, are the films shown under the 'State of Independents' rubric.

The nicest surprise here was Twenty Bucks, the debut of the young documentarist Reva Rosenfeld. Over a period of several days the eponymous $20 bill passes through various lands in Minneapolis, sometimes changing lives, sometimes merely making change. Its progress allows the makers to take a quirky, witty look at society from an Arab chewing-gum tycoon to a graceful bag lady, and at the role of money in the American dream. The script was written nearly 60 years ago by Endre Bohen when such portmanteau affairs (eg Grand Hotel, If I Had A Million) were used to pack the maximum number of studio contract artists into a single film. Never made, it has now been rewritten by his son, Leslie Bohen, and what is nice is the structure more a spiral, or Mobius strip, than a linear narrative.

Twenty Bucks has a strong cast of familiar faces, not all with familiar names, among them Linda Hunt as the bag I I mum mixnaa Deng in 7 due Foscari'. Photograph by Richard Mildenhall..