Opinion: Now and Then

As Dance Base's nine-hour dance extravaganza demonstrates - alongside the boundary-busting Dance Marathon at the Traverse - contemporary dance is a meaningless term. Balbir Singh's beat-box and tabla mash-up, Jack Webb's explosive improvisation and Ultimate Dancer's high art hilarity are all supposed to belong to this vague category, despite having little in common beyond "bodies moving in space".

Contemporary dance is, itself, a barrier to these brilliant, beautiful artists reaching into a Fringe that is awash with the predictable and mediocre. The script, at least in the UK, is often seen as the foundation of theatre, yet the abstract poetics of dance can explore ideas, emotions, even its own absurdities in an expressionistic and immediate manner. Yet "contemporary dance" is haunted by the spectre of strange, difficult and frigid bodies moving through impenetrable choreographies.

The reaction against ballet - led by Isadora Duncan who is far more important as icon than leaving any lasting legacy, a sort of Che Guevara of dance - led to a broad coalition of dancers who sought something beyond a specific western tradition. Some discovered their own disciplines - Cunningham, Graham - others plugged into other pasts, real or imagined. The resurgence of ballet technique has given birth to a very specific type of "contemporary" - which often refuses its influences. The reaction against has seen dancers explore Live Art, improvisations, mundane movement - anything that can offer inspiration.

Critic Havelock Ellis started the blather about dance being primary and essential- so is breathing, but Creative Scotland don't fund that - which disguises a more interesting possibility. The problems with defining dance open up choreographers to a freedom only dreamed of by those who work words. The phrase "contemporary dance" is a mere attempt to slap down the naughty body into a category, to contain it by making its art obscure. Time is called on the lazy defintion: contemporary dance is dead. Here's to critics who can find new, accurate descriptions.