Tilda Swinton plans flash dance for Edinburgh

SHE'S used to making a song and dance about her love of the cinema, but now Oscar winner Tilda Swinton is inviting local residents to join her for a jig in Festival Square.

Ms Swinton hopes to lead a "flash mob" in a rendition of a classic Laurel and Hardy comedy dance routine to mark the launch of a new foundation to encourage youngsters to broaden their taste in movies.

Ms Swinton's is launching the 8 1/2 Foundation, which she has founded alongside filmmaker and former Edinburgh Film Festival director Mark Cousins.

The foundation aims to collect a bank of films suitable for viewing by eight-and-a-half year olds, the age at which the pair believe children should move on from Disney movies into more challenging territory.

Ms Swinton said: "Come rain or shine, having had our porridge, we're going to meet at Festival Square. We'll chat, read papers, suck a lolly, whatever.

"Then at exactly 11am The Avalon Boys' soft shoe ditty At the Ball will start. It's a song from Laurel and Hardy's funniest film, Way Out West.

"In the film, Stan and Ollie do a wee dance, which is rubbish compared to Cyd Charisse, Gene Kelly or any trained dancer, and yet it's one of the most charming, amusing, gentle, child-like musical numbers in the whole of cinema history.

"And so, in tribute to Stan and Ollie, and to the wee boys inside them, and to their movies, and to dancing in public in Edinburgh, possibly in the rain, and in pure unabashed celebration of doing something as a group and looking like dafties, when the music starts we will put down our newspapers and our adult selves, and do the Laurel and Hardy dance from the film."

Way Out West featured former George Watson's College and Edinburgh University graduate James Finlayson, a Laurel and Hardy stalwart who starred in 33 of their films.

Some fifty years later, Finlayson's frustrated catchphrase, a drawn-out "dohhhhhhh!", inspired the shorter version often exclaimed by Homer in The Simpsons.

The flash mob stunt will be similar to an advert for telephone company T Mobile which featured 400 people dancing in unison at Liverpool Street Station, and won advert of the year at this year's British advertising awards.

On one occasion, Police were forced to close the station when 13,000 people responded to a Facebook bid to stage a reenactment, packing out the platform with silent dancers and raising fears of overcrowding.

The organisers have no idea how many people will take part in the Festival Square event.

Ms Swinton added: "We need people to join us – especially if they are eight-and-a-half, or 85, or an accountant, or passing by, or on the bus, or Alex Salmond, or an Edinburgh International Film Festival movie-goer, or in high heels, or grumpy, or bevvied, or a bit bewildered by the fact that the bell clock has moved from one side of Lothian Road to the other, or if you've just bought a talking-point lamp from Ali's Cave or you don't usually dance in public.

"If people don't join us we will look like total fools, though not for the first time. Yes, we will all bump into each other, and yes it'll look nothing like those flash mobs you see on YouTube, but it should be very amusing."

Ms Swinton has revealed her plans today to give people two weeks notice to learn the dance –which can be viewed at their website eightandahalf.org – in time for the even, which is due to take place on 26 June.