As soon as you walk through the doors at Scottish Ballet's Tramway base, you can feel a buzz of barely suppressed excitement.

Dancers, technicians, ballet staff, office staff - and perhaps, especially, Christopher Hampson in his first year as artistic director - are all caught up in it. Why? Because they're counting down the last remaining days and hours before the company launches its Dance Odysseys mini-season at this year's Edinburgh International Festival (EIF). What once seemed a pipe dream of artistic ambitions is about to become a reality.

Previous visits to the EIF have seen the company on the Playhouse stage, showcasing world-class technique in triple bills of Balanchine, Forsythe, Ashton and others. This year, the whole approach - the content and its presentation - is radically different, but no less challenging. If anything, Dance Odysseys could be a tougher act to pull off, because it is so crammed with choreographic contrasts and alternative perspectives. Until it happens, it's like a jigsaw that's still in the box: will all the pieces come together when it kicks off in less than a fortnight?

In fact, Hampson has already had to deal with one of the wheels coming off the Edinburgh-bound juggernaut. The plan was to end the first of Scottish Ballet's four days at the Festival Theatre with a new commission by the Canadian choreographer Edouard Lock, whose ability to send dancers travelling across a stage at blistering warp speeds or hurtling, like heat-seeking missiles through the air, has made him a hot ticket worldwide.

"We knew Edouard really wanted to make this piece on us," says Hampson. "He'd been over here, met the dancers. We'd even sorted out the music and a rehearsal schedule. But then his time in the studio kept being pushed back because of family illness. He was dreadfully conflicted over it, so rather than put any more pressure on him I took the decision to cancel that opening commission and programme a double bill of other works instead."

He's relaxed and smiling as he details this unexpected, late upheaval, but the re-jigged event has proved a silver lining to a potential cloud. In pairing Kenneth MacMillan's Sea Of Troubles - a tautly dramatic evocation of Shakespeare's Hamlet set to music by Webern and Martinu - with his own larger-scale Silhouette (first made for Royal New Zealand Ballet in 2010), Hampson has deftly foregrounded two of the main thematic motifs of Dance Odysseys.

One is to bring together the most exuberant, richly textured celebration of dance that can be located under one roof. Silhouette, to music by one of Hampson's favourite composers, Poulenc, is like a dance ode to the tutu as an iconic image. "Even people who aren't dance-inclined know what a tutu is, and what it represents," he says. "And though there are so many other styles in this four-day festival-within-a-festival, we are a classical ballet company. We're proud of those roots, and Silhouette shows that off."

The other influencing strand, which focuses on the dynamic qualities of small-scale works, owes its origins to a meeting Hampson had last year with the EIF's director, Jonathan Mills.

"It really turned into one of those game-changing conversations," he explains. "Jonathan was talking about how he could have not only big orchestral works but chamber pieces in his music programme, which begged the question: where were the chamber ballets? And that idea really took hold of us. I'd always said I wanted Scottish Ballet to go forward not just by bringing new works into the repertoire, but also through finding new ways of bringing dance to an audience. And what Jonathan has given us, with that one starting point of 'chamber pieces', is the most amazing opportunity to do all of that and more."

When he then lists what's scheduled across the four days of Dance Odysseys, it's hard not to feel like a kid in a sweet shop. And it's easy to understand why Hampson is so lit up at the prospect of a workload that would bring many a company to its knees. Everything that's being rehearsed, including the opening night double bill, is new to the dancers. Most of them weren't even born when Scottish Ballet's founder-choreographer, Peter Darrell, died in 1987, so his choreographies - which will be part of the Duets programme - were as much an unknown quantity to them as the steps that Helen Pickett has been shaping on the four bodies premiering her take on Sartre's one-act play, No Exit.

It's this range of close encounters with unfamiliar styles and this engagement with a slew of new and energising creative people that Hampson sums up as "the most wonderful gift any festival could give to a company. Not just for when we're on stage in August, but for our future. We simply couldn't have contemplated this many new commissions, or even asking choreographers to let us have existing works, without this EIF support. We'll be feeding off these benefits for season after season to come.

"And yes, I do keep pinching myself when I walk into our building, and there's a different visiting choreographer at work in every studio. One might be the norm, in a good year; we've been able to bring in five of the most exciting dance-makers of the moment and commission them to create work on our dancers. Actually Henri Oguike is working with Scottish Dance Theatre, which brings those wonderful dancers into the mix and hopefully sends out a message that those old boundaries that divided dance into strictly classical or otherwise have broken down.

"Dance is dance is dance. And whether we're showing it on the main stage, or in the studio, or elsewhere - and we have some surprises lined up in the New Voices programme - we're embracing that vision as fully as we can, with the film screenings and the talks linking into that."

But if Dance Odysseys is a voyage of discovery about dance as an artform, it is also a reflection of Scottish Ballet's own journey. Not only is Darrell's legacy acknowledged, but many of the other choreographers on the programmes have links with the company. Kenneth MacMillan's Sea Of Troubles was part of a small-scale tour some 20 years ago, works by Jiri Kylian were regularly in the repertoire in the late 1980s and early 1990s, while only last year Martin Lawrance's Run For It was Scottish Ballet's outstanding contribution to the 2012 Dance GB triple bill.

As for Hampson, circumstances have dictated that he now has two works in the main-stage evening slots instead of one. The works in question couldn't be more different - in style, mood and intention - and, for many, will provide an intriguing introduction to Hampson as the choreographer now heading Scotland's national ballet company.

If Silhouette is a classy tutus-and- pointe-shoes piece involving 17 dancers, his Rite Of Spring is a brutal, physically pulverising response to the Stravinsky score that cuts through the folk-myth, and the customary mass of seething bodies, by having only three dancers delivering an endurance test of rivalry, betrayal and crushed ideals.

"This music now is almost too familiar to us," he says. "In a way it's actually 'old' music - it was first done in 1913 - and yet we still associate it with the shock of the new, the audience rioting in protest at the ballet. And I found myself thinking 'what angers or offends us today?' And wondering, really, how I could make a Rite Of Spring that felt relevant to our own times. And then I felt that it had to have a very political edge to it, a sense of how we are still sacrificing people in the name of causes or revolutions or religions. So then I made it about two brothers and a woman ... And it is intense and violent. The interrogation scenes really surprised a lot of people, friends especially, because that kind of full-on aggression isn't 'me'...

"But, and I think this is part of what we want Dance Odysseys to say to our audiences and indeed our dancers, it's all about taking that leap into the unknown. Challenging yourself. Trying something that's outside your comfort zone. Opportunities like Dance Odysseys don't come along very often in a company's history. We're determined to make it as special as we can for everybody."

Scottish Ballet present Dance Odysseys at Edinburgh's Festival Theatre from August 16-19. Details of each day's programme is at eif.co.uk