Juilliard Dance Triple Bill @ Edinburgh Playhouse

The prestigious Julliard Dance School in New York has been nurturing young talent since merging its music and dance departments in 1951. Opener The Waldstein Sonata is bittersweet, having been started by choreographer Jose Limon in 1971, but left incomplete due to his passing the following year. It was finished four years later by his protege Daniel Lewis who was a Juilliard alumnus. This elegant, sweeping performance with four men and four women is the most traditional, conventional piece of ballet on the bill tonight, with a luscious colour palette of plum and raspberry, ebbing and flowing around the dancers' every movement. Live music comes from exceptional young pianist Yuxi Qin playing Beethoven's Sonata No 21 in C Op 53. 

Gnawa, choreographed by internationally-renowned Nacho Duato is a heady, intoxicating brew of African and Morroccan styles, full of the energy of night-time, voodoo ritual and passion. Tea-lights in lanterns are held by the ensemble, who are stunningly attired in loose black and gold then scattered around the floorspace as the dancers weave and contort around each other, flexing to form a rippling human chain. It seems snakelike, purely animalistic. Processions evoke spirituality, and a lone dancer is tossed into the air by the others in a symbolic celebratory gesture, like a coming of age or a wedding. Circular motifs are a recurring theme in this work. A gorgeous, goosebump-inducing display of sensuality, which takes you out of yourself right from the beginning.

Finally, a short black and white behind the scenes mini-documentary playfully announces the last, most recent work on the bill, Episode 31. Following the making of the work, it shows some of the students rehearsing and even a flash mob in a busy New York subway, to the bemusement of commuters.

Alexander Ekman's piece, premiered at the end of last year, is inspired by Dadaism, Weimar cabaret and film noir, with the male and female dancers all in black and white, wearing stick-on moustaches and sock suspenders - gender blurring is a key component: some men also wear pleated skirts and there are athletic muscular shapes from the entire ensemble. A sense of running out of time pervades, the dancers fitting on the floor, then moving in clockwork motion to a vignette which looks like Busby Berkley doing contemporary dance. They snap fingers, cough and sigh as one; a living, breathing, pulsing human machine. [Lorna Irvine]