Dancing Between Forms - Festival Shows to Change Your Preconceptions of Dance Styles

In a recent Skinny editorial, Rupert spoke of a "formless future": a time when cross-platform and inter-disciplinary work has become so commonplace that ideas of genre are either confusing or useless. Dance has already arrived in this future: the Fringe programme is replete with fusions and stubborn juxtapositions, where capoeira and kathak collide and converse, and contemporary, once the sworn enemy of formal technique, informs even national ballet companies.

Zeitgeist, Zen Zen Zo's production at C warns that it contains "butoh, burlesque, loud music, smoke, partial nudity and flying food." In retrospect, the burlesque tag is misleading: there is none of the sensuous playfulness of a High Tease, only a series of intense and ocassionally humorous sketches that push both audience and performers to extremes. The first piece, Unleashed, is frightening and erotic: An End to Dreaming majestic and spiritual. While some of the audience were disappointed by the lack of stripping and kept up a loud conversation from the front row - a danger that the ellusive new audiences might present - Zeitgeist is a brave integration of Japanese influences and western satire. It is undoubtedly challenging, especially when the eggs start flying into the crowd.

The butoh influence is more on the surface, using the signifiers of the style - white painted bodies, contorted physiques, exaggerated facial expressions - and far away from Lindsay John's subtle explorations of the same art (with his new piece The Simplicity of Grasping Air). John aims to manifest interior states: Zen Zen Zo make illustrative social critiques. Yet they both represent the way that western performers are struggling with the stunning impact of this modern Japanese theatre.

In this eclecticism, dance is capable of wrestling with emotions that no other form can reach: the intangible anguish of missing a person that you barely know, or making explicit the shallow undertow of anguish behind glamour.

Formlessness is not merely another genre or strategy. It opens up possibilities. Formlessness can also emerge from a performer's personal process.

Iona Kewney's Self-Interrupted Exhibition developed from her own history as dancer and gymnast. Her time with the great Belgian choreographers has honed her approach, but she remains a true individual, at home in both live art and dance festivals. Her intensity and passion is coupled with a unique vision that sets her apart from nearly every other performer: like Zen Zen Zo, she is unafraid of disturbing, revelatory shows and pushes her body with the teancity of an Olympian athlete.

The appearance of Ian Smith in the And Then Some programme is another extreme. By collaborating with Glasgow photographer, dancer and visual artist Brian Hartley, he connects a very British humour with dance: a personal piece, again, but radically different in conception and intention.

Ultimately, all this makes dance difficult to define. Reviews and articles can be guides, suggesting interpretations, linking traditions. Yet the fluidity of forms and individualism of the artists ensure that a personal response is the only possible reading.