Clowning walks, classical spins and Fred Astaire sashays meet in a wild mix of styles spun into a single silver thread of experience And he’s still a world-beater.. At the centre of The Architect by David Greig, one of Scotland’s most exciting new dramatists, stands the isolated figure of Leo Black (superbly played by Alexander Morton): architect, husband and father of two. But the audience is there for the Russian – who at 48 is triumphant proof that dance no more depends on dynamo-driven youth than the sun needs the moon to shine.True, the work is carefully chosen. In the case of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice (fully reviewed by Michael White), not only was his outlandishly hands- off opera direction a dismal failure, but his choreography was a mess Yet they cheered His fans do him no service with such adulation.

North of Watford capitalises on this acquired, unnatural alertness, offering us a similar mixture but from outside London – and, happily, without the plugging. In the first of a new series of Word of Mouth (R4), Russell Davies was in America with Nash’s daughter, sifting through the scraps of verse he left behind in their family home. The event is a visit by the White Oak Dance Project – a collective of mature American dancers devoted to cultivating serious new works. Last week I asked of the Festival: “How will they ever let him go?” Now I think perhaps they should.But lo, up he turns again a few nights later at the London Coliseum, where the great Mikhail Baryshnikov – a close buddy – is dancing a solo recently commissioned from Morris.

In Sketches from Chronicle, a powerful triptych from 1936 on the theme of war, female armies gallop, surge, almost fly across the stage at speeds that leave the spectator gasping for breath and dizzy with joy. And when it’s over, you know it’s because there is nothing more to say. Freud, fashion, feminism: Martha Graham could do it all – and she has left a company fully at one with her legacy.As a parting shot from Edinburgh, it remains to temper my fulsome praise of Mark Morris last week. As a choreographer uniquely inspired and inspiring when he chooses his own scores (anything from Bach to Bombay film music), he’d do well to resist the flatteries of festival directors who would plonk him in front of an opera. One might have taken this object for a blasted tree but for a programme note which described it as having been modelled (this in 1947) on a woman’s pubic bone.For all the historical interest of Graham’s work, it is still radical in the best sense No dance-maker alive today speaks with such directness.

Her unadorned symbolism leaves much of our self- consciously modern dance with its cultivated obscurity looking tame And for accessibility it has no match. The dancer Christine Dakin achieved a spine-bristling exposition of terror in this study of intimidation, finally taking triumphant refuge in the embrace of Isamu Noguchi’s stark sculpture from the original production. Stretch jersey was hot from the mill in 1930.Similarly hard-edged, iconic design was at the centre of all the ensemble works that followed, from the weird religious rites of El Penitente – inspired by an American sect that acts out the crucifixion as a penance for mild misdemeanours – to the myth-psychology of Errand Into the Maze, which takes the Greek story of Ariadne and the Minotaur to explore a specifically female experience of fear.Here was fundamental Graham technique laid bare – a system of contraction and release inspired by the simple human act of breathing: contraction (curving the chest inwards and rounding the neck) to suggest fear, sorrow, introversion; release (expanding the chest) for affirmation or ecstasy. In the solo Lamentation, harrowing grief is expressed through the angular lines of tension created by the dancer’s costume – a long, clinging tube of mauve jersey. A mourner’s hood, a son’s shroud, even a woman’s intimate body parts are vividly suggested in a mesmerising sequence of a stylised movement. Yet on a more prosaic level the piece arose from Graham’s gift as a fashion designer and a keen awareness of new fabrics.