Tutu review

It’s possible that for some in a packed McEwan Hall, Tutu will be the only dance show they’ll see in Edinburgh, which is a shame. The company Chicos Mambo was founded almost 30 years ago in Barcelona when choreographer Philippe Lafeuille met two dancers, a Catalan and a Venezuelan, and they began to collaborate. The idea behind the show, created in 2014 and making a return to the fringe, is to lovingly mock the most famous of ballet costumes – and the dance world itself – but ‘loving mockery’ can feel uneasy, even dismaying, as anyone who’s experienced it will know, especially when the jokes aren’t particularly funny.

First, the positives – there are moments of both comedy and beauty as the six male dancers take on, in 20 tableaux, a huge range of works and styles: Swan Lake, the classic pas de deux, Strictly Come Dancing, Pina Bausch, Dirty Dancing, the haka, the tango and more. The Strictly contestant miming “phone in and vote” throughout the dance itself is hilarious and the male dancers teetering precariously en pointe as if staggering on stilts is chucklesome too. At other moments, Tutu’s humour is a blunt instrument: quacking ducklings, wiggling bottoms, nappies, burping, hitting each other with vegetables.

The changes of mood can be jarring. It’s unclear whether Tutu wants simply to be funny or to prove how beautifully male dancers can move. A dancer spinning en pointe, holding on to a rope with one hand, becomes a human spinning top, impressive and hypnotic. Another shows off his exquisite back and port de bras in The Dying Swan, which almost brought tears to the eyes, until he started making duck-like hand silhouettes instead. It can be hard to be a male dancer. In a telling segment, the performers repeat lines they might have heard from childhood: “Are you gay? Are you Billy the faggot?” Elsewhere, Tutu is guilty of its own stereotypes, evoking a team of rhythmic gymnasts with dark hair in tight buns and high-pitched voices.

Dance – and ballet in particular – can take itself too seriously of course, but much here feels derivative, even the male tutu itself – Matthew Bourne’s male swans donned their feathered trousers and danced sensual pas de deux in 1995, the much-loved Trocks have worn tutus and danced en pointe since 1974 and Danny Kaye took the mickey out of Martha Graham’s modern “choreography” in White Christmas in 1954. Watching such a talented bunch roll around in feathery nappies to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring felt like a waste of that blood-stirring music and the dancers’ potential.