Inspired by Handel's moving music

Edinburgh International Festival: If you wanted to make a dance piece about acceleration, about the kind of elemental forces that can shake a world apart - what music would you choose?

If you wanted to make a dance piece about acceleration, about the kind of elemental forces that can shake a world apart - or our piece of mind - what music would you choose? Would Handel elbow to the front of the queue? Would Baroque recitative shout out its appropriateness in your ear? Catalonian choreographer Cesc Gelabert didn't have a moment's hesitation.

"As soon as I started thinking about acceleration, about showing tempo - the quickening of pace, going towards a frenzy - it brought me to Handel. Well, for one thing I like Handel - a very important reason to use his music. But because what matters in this piece isn't so much the rhythm, it is the variations in tempo and Handel has a clear mastery over that. I knew, listening again to his music, that this was what would allow me to make Conquassabit."

Meanwhile, miles away from Gelabert's studios in Barcelona, Jonathan Mills was also thinking about Handel as he put together the programme for this year's Edinburgh International Festival (EIF). Opera? For sure. Music? The opening concert is Handel's Judas Maccabeus. Could the dots join up a little further? Include dance? Mills was already familiar with much of the back catalogue of the Gelabert-Azzopardi Companyia de Dansa. He knew, as indeed EIF regulars who have followed the dance strand since 1998 will second, that Gelabert's flair for melding quirky, intriguing visual design with intelligent musicality fed in, organically, to his choreographic process.

Add in the surreal spark of his native Catalonia, and you have dance works that are vivid, engaging and truly distinctive, but with a bedrock of themes and concepts that resonate with a universal humanity.

For Mills, the sentence in Gelabert's forward plans that read "Conquassabit: music by George Frederic Handel" was akin to an opening line of siren-song. He had to know more. Come August, EIF audiences will see the outcome of the Mills-Gelabert-Azzopardi conversations: a double bill of work that pairs the exuberant, exquisite Conquassabit with another recent piece, Sense Fi, that is, according to Gelabert, "about keeping a smile on your face, whatever happens. Even if you are in front of the hurricane ... so it is a partner for Conquassabit."

His own partner, both off-stage and as co-director of the company, is dancer/choreographer/teacher Lydia Azzopardi, whose own background has a British accent. She trained at the London Contemporary Dance School before working in Europe, co-founding their Barcelona-based company with Gelabert in 1985. It's her eye that informs the costume designs, her instinct that - and Gelabert is always quick to point up her input here - kicks in when it comes to auditioning new recruits. Of late, there has been an influx of fresh faces.

"It was time for everyone to change," says Azzopardi. "Not just for us, but for our previous dancers. There comes a point when it's right, even if it feels a little sad, a little painful, for people to move on. You can't be stupidly sentimental about it."

Gelabert, meanwhile, is nodding as she says this. Change, transition, facing up to new challenges, are all undercurrents in the work that will be coming to Edinburgh.

What Azzopardi found, when they started auditioning, was that there were a lot of really good boys in the line-up. "You have to go with what's in front of you," she says. "There were some really outstanding boys, and I think there is a male energy that is really very beautiful. Not macho. Not arrogant. A bit of a swagger, I'd describe it as noble. An elegance that can also be dashing."

And, as it happens, exactly what Gelabert could build on when he came to make Conquassabit. "It's true," he agrees. "There was a very beautiful, positive energy there which I think is important for this piece. The Latin word originally meant convulsing but it has come to mean a shattering into pieces. And this was where I was going with my concept of accelerating. At the end, it is frantic. We have had this earlier moment of calm - the eye of the hurricane - but then the tempo quickens and bodies are shuddering as if they would fracture. But it is also a kind of ecstasy. An optimism. Something that is exhilarating - which the dancers feel, but also goes across to audiences too."

There is a pause. Gelabert is not given to mouthy self-promotion. Even when, in 2004, his ongoing contribution to the EIF - Zum-Zum Ka (1998) and Arthur's Feet (with special needs adults), Glimpse (his solos) and Viene regando Flores (the whole company), all in 2004 - brought him a Bank of Scotland Herald Archangel, there was no grand-standing on his part. So what he says next is as much a reflection on dance as an artform, as it is a comment on Conquassabit.

"This show seems to create an energy in the audience," he says. "It makes them feel free, exalted, beyond thinking or analysing - worrying, maybe - what it was about. It seems to reach out to them. For me, this is a plus. It only ever happened once or twice before. Other choreographers, Pina Bausch and William Forsythe, I have felt it with their work, but not always. And I have other pieces which I like as much. But they don't happen, or have an effect, this way. But when it communicates ... it has this inclusion of an audience."

He smiles, half shrugs. Simply put: Conquassabit has totally wowed not just the home crowd in Barcelona, but those onlookers who saw it on a recent European and American tour. Musically, it is both cunning and surprising. Gelabert's soundscore brings together instrumental and vocal strands to conjure up a remarkable landscape of shifting temperaments. Some sections, he has manipulated so as to heighten the intensity - that final frenetic fragmentation is driven by buzzing strings that seem to sting the dancers into ever more hectic spasms. The eye of his storm, however, rejoices in a calm serenity where slow, sensual movement unfolds on a silver carpet that has billowed down from above. Gelabert laughs as he recalls how he and designer Llorenc Corbella went through several phases before deciding on the look of this huge, shimmering cloth that also acts as a sculptural backdrop to the choreography.

"At first," Gelabert explains "we were talking paper. White paper. Which then became gold, because we were thinking Baroque. Gold turned to silver, because we thought that would be better for the lighting. Then we started to think paper would be too thin. Now we have this huge, silver cloth - and I don't think, even now, we have discovered all its possibilities. It transforms the space. It can be overhead, like the sky. It can lower, to be like a lake or a mirror. It can hang, like a column - or for me, it can become like a wall. And when it's like that, you can reveal and conceal. And yes, it does look very beautiful."

His own costume in Conquassabit is rather fine too. Azzopardi took his comment that - her words - "he wanted something like this tracksuit he wears" and transformed it into a lithe black velvet outfit, flashed with red. In it Gelabert's tall frame and his shaven head take on a period elegance. He talks of being like a master of ceremonies, his tall gold staff with its tinkling sleigh bells initiating new sounds and rhythms into the score.

His solos, however, have a character that move well beyond the usual genres. Commedia del arte gestures slip in, between lines of pure classicism. A folkloric step adds a fresh dimension to contemporary groundwork. Above all, there's a poise and ability to hold and generate stillness that inclines one to coin the term "Catalan Butoh" to encompass the expressive grace that is intrinsic to Gelabert's own performance. Not that he insists his dancers are clones of his own style. Instead, he encourages them to find their own way inside his choreography. "I believe in individuality, in how each person can bring the ideas, the movements, alive. This is what will speak to an audience. I always say the dancer should make the choreography disappear."