On Monday the team at Imaginate will roll out their 24th "international festival of performing arts for children and young people".

Time was that this event badged itself in terms of theatre but, as Tony Reekie, artistic director of the Edinburgh-based organisation, explains, things have changed.

Three of the 13 shows on offer are contemporary dance pieces, while several others use movement as an integral part of the performance. This focus on dance includes a new home-grown production, Chalk About.

Reekie is chipper about this, because it has taken him years to find the kind of choreography that young audiences will find interesting and entertaining.

"You're looking for the same high-quality work in dance we now have in theatre," he says." "Apart from the festival's own reputation, you don't want anyone – regardless of how old, or young, they are – going away thinking that dance isn't as good, inventive or surprising as the other shows in our programme.

"We have tried, over the years, to find the companies that could deliver that world-class work. If bringing it in from abroad was a struggle – the really good companies can't just drop everything to come to Edinburgh in May – it was even more of a challenge to find the home-grown talent that could sit alongside the international stuff. Then last year, Chris and Leandro showed Chalk About as a work in progress ..."

It wasn't just that the informal showing at North Edinburgh Arts Centre had the look of something fresh and user-friendly for an eight-plus age group. It was the reassuring proof that the European connections Imaginate forges outwith its festival showcase really could deliver new and exciting initiatives.

The Chris he refers to is Scottish choreographer Christine Devaney, already highly regarded for the work she makes with her own company, Curious Seed.

Leandro is Leandro Kees, an Argentinian dance-maker now living and working in Germany. You could say they met on a "blind date" that ended up with them collaborating on Chalk About.

Devaney fills in some of the back-story: as part of a project set up by Fresh Tracks Europe (which describes itself as a youth dance network for a new generation of choreographers), she had represented Imaginate at a workshop in Utrecht in Holland.

"There were 11 choreographers from all across Europe," she says, "and on the first day they divided us into groups and just said 'make a piece'. To begin with, there were three in my group, but a Swedish girl left on the second day, so it was just Leandro and me – complete strangers with no idea what kind of work the other person made or how they went about making that work.

"So we just started asking each other questions, and that led into showing movement, and that was the start of what's now become Chalk About."

Devaney's previous work, especially the touchingly honest solo piece, The Woman Who Wants To Be Funny, which she made with musician Luke Sutherland, has tended to reflect on issues of identity, pinpointing experiences that help to shape and define us. When she and Kees began exchanging elements of this personal information, it was a kind of fast-forward tactic in a workshop.

"But then we realised it could be the piece we had been asked to make," continues Devaney. "Everything we were doing applied just as much to children as to adults. Questions of 'how would you describe yourself?', 'what do you want to do when you grow up?' and, just as importantly, 'what are you?' and 'what are you not?'. It's a narrative and language does come into it on stage. Narrative doesn't come just from words. It comes from the body and from what else you can see."

Although Kees has an impressive fluency in Spanish and German as well as English, Devaney cheerfully reveals that, wherever they've trialled Chalk About in Europe, it has been warmly received by young audiences who readily engage with the humour, the quirkiness and the emotional depths it contains.

Kees adds: "I think it has been an artistic adventure. We came up with something that is new to both of us, a performance that is a mixture of our personalities and ways of moving. The work itself took a lot of talking, thinking and reflecting, yet to do it on stage feels the opposite – it is both intuitive and entertaining, even for me being inside, because it changes a bit every time. I think the funniest thing is still to see or hear people's reactions while we perform."

Reekie would happily second that: "After we watched it in Vienna recently, I just felt so proud that we had seen that early creative spark between Chris and Leandro and Imaginate had been able to help them take it forward and develop it fully. The great thing about dance and children is that children actually 'live' through movement.

"We only learn, as adults, to behave – think, respond, express ourselves – from the neck upwards as we get older. Children skip about the place. We forget to skip. We can appreciate dance, of course, but I think dance speaks to children in a language they know under their own skin."

The Imaginate festival opens in Edinburgh on Monday. Full programme details at imaginate.org.uk.