Dance Review: Dance Base, Grassmarket

For anyone out there who likes a moan about the Fringe becoming too expensive, too shiny, or just too blooming big for its boots, I have two words for you. Dance Base.

It's no secret that Scotland's National Centre for Dance is a top-class venue but last year it upped the ante in the midst of the economic meltdown and began charging a recession-friendly fiver for its shows. Considering you have to fork out at least double that for a Fringe ticket, that's seriously good value.

Happily this year the spirit of thriftiness continues. Ten shows, each a fiver, on the hour, every hour. There's even the added guarantee of your next one free if you don't "love" your choice. I can't imagine they'll be giving many tickets away though.

120 Birds, below, choreographed by and starring the pouting, flirting, strutting 'Madam' Liz Lea, is a gem. Based on an international tour that Anna Pavlova made in the 1920s to Sydney (travelling with, yes, 120 birds), this story of a young Australian company following in her footsteps is told through dance, fantastic archive footage and fashion from the period. There are more costume changes in 120 Birds than Katy Perry pulled off at last week's Teen Choice Awards.

Lea is a natural comedian and does the coy, clipped 1920s delivery with aplomb. She is also a very fine choreographer. The dance is thoroughly modern one moment, all Beyonc big licks and high kicks, and a demure waltz the next. There is a lovely tango, a section in which the Charleston steps are enunciated while the performers interpret them through athletic contemporary dance and a finale, with feathers and fringed dresses, to Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. True, I kept wondering where to look because there is often too much going on, but the chic and cheek of the 1920s is beautifully evoked. A show as polished as a flapper's painted nails.

Place Prize finalist Lucy Suggate is one of the most thrilling dancers currently at Dance Base. She performs two short but killer solos in Base Elements, first in a gold bodysuit to weird, vocoder-treated music in Liquid Gold. Suggate's torso undulates so the dim light shimmers across the gold, her spine as supple as liquid. It's almost like watching body-popping in very slow motion. It's futuristic, sensual and strange.

For Latin Beach, she tapes her face into a grotesque expression and dances a childlike, damaged samba in a pink wig and trashy dress. The music is hyper-masculine - the grizzled Americana of Ry Cooder - but the shimmying Latin dance hyper-feminine. It's a jarring, disconcerting solo that says more about the constraints on female sexuality in a few minutes than plenty of text-based theatre says in an hour.

In between, New Yorker Jody Sperling, pictured top, dances her signature work inspired by Loie Fuller, the pioneering early 20th-century dancer who whirled around in billowing silk and was painted by, among others, Toulouse-Lautrec. It's a beautiful piece, to piano music by Chopin and Ravel, and Sperling is skilled at making her 100 yards of white silk ripple and rise up around her, twirling in and out of the light like a silken spinning top. But I failed to see the contemporary aspect of the work. It seemed more like straightforward homage to me.

My Name is Margaret Morris is homage of a different kind. A collaboration between choreographer Stuart Hopps and actor Barbara Rafferty, in a neat twist it's Hopps who plays Morris. I knew little about this extraordinary Renaissance woman of dance who was the lifelong partner of JD Fergusson and formed Scotland's Celtic Ballet. It's a lovely tale of love and dance and divadom ("Everything seemed to be going in a Martha-ish kind of way," Hopps/Morris says, flicking a red shawl over one shoulder), but it simply isn't dance. I wonder why, considering Hopps's intention to bring back to life a woman whose work has been sadly neglected, there is this absence of movement. It's such a tender homage of a true pioneer, the lack of physicality felt like a missed opportunity.

Not What I Had In Mind is a classic example of a good idea poorly executed. Robin Dingemans is spoken of in "next big thing" terms and this piece won him a nomination at the Critics' Circle National Dance Awards, but it doesn't feel fully realised.

Dingemans asked 28 people, most of whom had no experience of dance, to choreograph movements on him. This is the result of that workshop. So far, so fascinating, but unfortunately it's like a work in progress itself. Accompanied by live experimental noise made by Manuel Pinheiro, Dingemans alternates dance - star jumps expressing happiness, falling like a rag doll to show boredom - with short lectures. Some of the movement, especially the ordinary gestures like scratching his face becoming pure dance, is lovely. But the delivery is stilted and the overall effect alienating. I got the feeling that somewhere in all this was an excellent show screaming to get out. All the same, I couldn't say it wasn't worth a fiver.

Dance Base, 14-16 Grassmarket, until 22 Aug (not tomorrow), various times

• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, August 15, 2010