IN the run up to Fringe-time, Morag Deyes, artistic director of Dance Base in Edinburgh, allows her inner magpie to take wing and go foraging for work that can catch at the heart and mind as well as the eye. She doesn’t go searching with a specific theme in mind and yet, as she says with a mixture of surprise and amusement: “When I start looking at the choices I’ve made, and the programme we’ll present on the Fringe, themes do start to emerge and connections I hadn’t been aware of at the time come leaping out – so maybe I should just pretend that it was all intentional and very clever.” She might get away with that if only she didn’t start laughing – being pompous about programming has never been Deyes’s style.

She is, however, very serious about the work that will feature during August at Venue 22 (aka Dance Base, Scotland’s National Centre for Dance in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket). Serious, because her 2016 showcase is rooted in the flesh-and-blood humanity of freedom.

“There’s the whole thing of how dancers have this freedom of movement,” she says, “but it’s not just about these fabulous bodies doing incredible things, wowing audiences with their beauty and grace, their energy and – sometimes unexpectedly – a very oddball sense of humour. This is about dancers making work about the things that matter to all of us now, and in the future. Freedom, and the right to make choices in our lives about what we think, feel and believe about gender, sexuality, territory, religion and self-expression, is a recurring concern in the performances that we’ve scheduled during August.”

That roster sees Scottish initiatives lining up beside a variety of work from 13 countries with contributions from Palestine, Taiwan, South Africa, Denmark and Ireland. Some of the home grown talent is, moreover, part of the Made in Scotland (MiS) showcase that draws together a representative, and impressively diverse, slice of what is generated throughout the year by Scottish artists. Three MiS picks – Poggle, Bird and Dancer – also reflect the breadth of vision at Dance Base. Poggle (by Barrowland Ballet) is an uplifting piece of early years dance-theatre (age guideline 6 months to 4 years) where a walk in the forest becomes a tremendous sensory adventure for everyone. Live music, gorgeous visuals, and even woodland smells combine as scaredy-cat Vince learns there’s a magical side to the Poggle’s natural environment. And the joining in bits are the stuff of fun for tinies.

Older children and adults (age guideline 12 +) can enter into a somewhat darker realm of existence with Bird (Sita Pieraccini in association with Feral). There’s a post-apocalyptic feel to the wasteland where Pieraccini’s lone, and lonely, being goes scavenging for survival. Her mime speaks graphically of a hunger that yearns for friendship as well as food, her clowning makes the inevitable disappointments a source of comedy – for us, anyhow. The end is not exactly a laughing matter: it’s a beautifully calculated question: how far would you go to survive?

Dancer, co-created with the late Adrian Howells and performed by learning-disabled artist Ian Johnston in cahoots with Gary Gardiner, is one of those energising, life-affirming pieces that makes you want to dance to the music with them. If the Dance Base programme is inclined to think that dance reaches the parts that other arts don’t always touch, then Dancer delves – and boogies – into why that is. Elsewhere Eve Mutso, a former Scottish Ballet principal dancer, echoes Deyes’s comments about freedom with her solo, Unknown. Seen earlier this year at Tramway, this is risk-taking in action, a testing of body and mind by stepping away from familiar moves and comfort zones.

On the international front, the mix of styles and content embraces Palestinian contemporary dance inspired by Dabke folk traditions, South African gumboot and pantsula, traditional Irish dance mashed up with tango, and classical Indian Kathak direct from Delhi. There’s also Denmark’s Don Gnu who don’t really fit into any one category – which is just how company co-founders ‘Don’ (Jannik Elkær) and ‘Gnu’ (Kristoffer Louis Andrup Pedersen) prefer it.

Elkær will, in a conversation about comedic influences, say “we’ve come up with a genre we call ‘slap-dance’ – it has those clown moments you find in old Buster Keaton films, or in circus acts. But that physical fooling around with the planks of wood, or the competitiveness with the big bouncy balls, is not just to get laughs. These moments have an underlying purpose. It’s part of the relationship between two grown up dudes who are really very confused about what it means to be a man today.”

Their own relationship stretches back to 2007 when both men were performing with Aarhus’s Granhoj Dans Company. Pedersen recalls the initial click of mutual understanding. Conventional dance-making wasn’t cutting it for either of them, so during break-times they’d spark ideas off each other, improvising and creating choreographic episodes that were off-the-wall wacky but, as he says, “with our characters in them, and already saying something.”

It wasn’t until 2010, however, that those characters officially came together as Don Gnu with Don as the swaggering alpha ego, and Gnu (think wildebeest and herd mentality) as his ostensibly passive sidekick. Their first company outing was Men in Sandals and it established a motif that still comes on-stage today in their forthcoming Dance Base appearance, M.I.S – All Night Long. Elkær explains what lies behind that signature image of woolly, hand-knitted socks and comfy, if naff, sandals, which are, on occasions, the only costuming the duo wear. “It’s about wanting to look tough, maybe a little back to that bad fashion hippy look of men wearing sandals, but then you have the soft socks so you won’t get blisters, and they’re giving you comfort.

"For us, it is that conflict that is still with us. That 70’s thing – we were both born in the 70’s – when men were supposed to let their softer feelings show but then, like now, they still had to deal with the masculine beast inside. How?”

For Pedersen, this chafing of opposing archetypes is also to do with being an individual – your own self – in a relationship. He speaks about Don Gnu in terms of collaboration and interdependance, not just on-stage but off.

“Even at the airport, I will be there first,” he says, laughing. “I will be the responsible, organised one – Jannik will be Don, arriving at the last minute, expecting it all to go ahead as planned. But without Don, there would be no show for Gnu to go on tour with. And it is the need between us, the way we each can have controls, that is part of how we explore ideas of masculinity and relationships.”

Helping, or often hindering, in their quest for answers is El Chino (Simon Beyer-Pedersen) whose bid to get in on the duo’s act creates mayhem. Elkær says: “It forces the focus on what is actually serious in the humour and chaos. Maybe the audience has to choose whose side they could be on: who really deserves to wear the socks!”

With film, animation and live music abetting the cleverly madcap antics, those Men in Sandals have had audiences in Denmark and beyond wishing the show really did last All Night Long.

Full details of all performances at www.dancebase.co.uk