Folk, Edinburgh Festival review: Pastoral beauty amid all the sweat and scowling

Folk, performed by National Dance Company Wales and choreographed by Caroline Finn, was the last show I saw this year in Edinburgh — and I went home elated.

The set is simple. A chalky white tree is suspended from the lighting rig, spreading its roots over a pile of crisp leaves. The colours are those of John Everett Millais’s Autumn Leaves: fawn, russet, slate, pewter.

From this raked leaf heap, Camille Giraudeau erupts. She smiles radiantly. The other dancers smile radiantly — it’s a relief from the sweat and scowling elsewhere.

They move with sapling springiness. Slender arms shiver like blown leaves. We might be on a village green for a late harvest festival. In one charming vignette the ensemble seems to stamp down grapes for wine. But these are no clod-hopping Rude Mechanicals or yomping maypole dancers. Instead: ecstatic lifts and falls, swellings and eddyings of bodies. Elena Thomas soars like a swallow leaving for South Africa.

There are missteps. Thomas started yowling in French — though she danced gorgeously, like a spinning sycamore seed, as she did so. Later the cast start laughing manically as if they’d been at the moonshine. These are only small quibbles. Folk is only 30 minutes long. I left greedy for more.

Until Fri, Zoo Southside; 200festival.co.uk