Episode 2 Edinburgh Extra

This programme contains some strong language

Welcome to Edinburgh, world's biggest arts festival. Tonight, George RR Martin,

creator of the worldwide TV phenomenon Game Of Thrones.

Professor Mary Beard on the jokes that tickled the ancient Romans.

Priceless pots from Ming dynasty China...

Strictly's Bruno Tonioli hotfoots his way around

the festival's most dazzling dance shows,

And music from Flamenco legend Paco Pena.

The Edinburgh Festival was founded in the aftermath of World War II,

with the aim of providing a platform for the flowering

of the human spirit through the power of the arts.

This year's event features a number of artistic responses to conflict,

from the Trojan War to the recent military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.

EXPLOSIONS

Across the centuries, artists, writers and poets have

produced some of their most powerful work in direct response to warfare.

War is a major theme at this year's Edinburgh Festival.

Halt! LAUGHTER

At the Traverse,

Valentijn Dhaenens' SmallWar is a multi-media exploration

of the horrors of war set in a field hospital just behind the front line.

Fighting can be a source of joy.

For some, perhaps, even the greatest joy of all. Hmm?

Why else choose, voluntarily, at the risk of dying, to go into war?

To fight, to kill...?

Dhaenens' production is a technically complex one-man show.

He uses projections and looping techniques to explore the experiences of a number

of characters, including a nurse and a wounded soldier.

When you started to construct this piece, where did you start?

Did you start with history books? Letters, photographs?

Over the course of a year, I only read about war.

I stressed on the First World War but I couldn't resist reading about

the Second World War, especially the psychology thing of war.

I think that's a big thing I wanted to put in.

Did you then lift from the interviews into dialogue,

or is your dialogue completely constructed by you?

That's like a mixture. I guess what I always do, it's like sampling.

You take bits, and I pick a mother from a letter

and I pick a son of another letter and I put them together

and let them have a dialogue.

'When it's my turn, will you want me to go?

'Any man would give his son for democracy.

'I won't be here to stop you, that's for sure.'

I really wanted to stress on the people who get shell-shock,

who don't know what to do any more.

They might only have an explosion of anger, then the collapse again.

My piece has a very slow pace and I wanted to make something very

opposite to all the other ways we get war into our lives.

MELANCHOLY MUSIC

It's not just World War I that has been covered at this year's festival.

More recent conflicts, such as the war in Afghanistan,

have also inspired work.

The play, Britannia Waves The Rules deals with the psychological

consequences of the Afghan war on young combatants.

It tells the story of Carl Jackson,

an unemployed man from Blackpool who longs to leave his home town.

Will you work? Why won't you work?

You've got to get a job and behave.

But a job is a wage and a wage is a cage in a town like mine.

He feels like there's nowhere to go and nothing to do, which is

a line that runs throughout the play.

He decides to join the Army, he thinks it's a way out of Blackpool,

he thinks it's a way to see the world.

And here's to the heights,

to the illustrious sights of foreign excitement and glory!

So, goodbye, bleak British backwater boredom.

And hello to being the best.

To guns and drums and fighting fitness.

To getting ahead of the rest.

The shock of war takes a grip of Carl after his colleague is killed in action.

As a result, he develops post-traumatic stress disorder.

There's still a great need to understand war, particularly

Iraq, Afghanistan.

Is it something that your generation talk about,

the battles that Britain is fighting?

I think it is something that has been almost pushed down...

the order of things in the news, which is something that gets to

me, and it's something that the writer said inspired him to write this play.

When it first started, it was the first thing on the news.

This is what is going on in Afghanistan today.

This is what is going on in Iraq.

And slowly and slowly, things would start to go ahead of that,

and that was one of the things that inspired him

because he felt like it was getting forgotten about.

I want to stop. You can't stop. It doesn't stop.

It doesn't end until it's forced to stop.

We fight, we win, we fight some more. It doesn't stop!

Since it's been on, have there been people in the audience

who've talked to you about their experiences?

Yeah, we had a guy and he just came up to me

and said, I was in the forces. He said, I knew people who ended up like that.

He said it was so real and he said I couldn't watch some of it.

And he said... Sort of had this conversation with me,

and I turned to him and I said, "That's why I do this job."

The Iraq War has also affected the poet Brian Turner,

who served as a sergeant there in the US Army.

His memoir, My Life As A Foreign Country, was partly written

whilst serving in Iraq.

Looking back now, I can see that the process of writing created

a space that was larger than the role I was.

I was Sergeant Turner when I was there.

And Sergeant Turner is too small of an imaginative space for one person to live in.

And so the notebooks were a space for me to say

and to use language I couldn't use in everyday life.

"When I leave the tent, tens of thousands,

"perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of dead

"people will begin leaving their tent and following us home.

"And the wounded and the maimed and the traumatised

"and the frightened and the shattered and the shivering

"and the bruised and the broken and the disfigured.

"The ruined world will call its home inside of me."

Writing the book was a way of coming to terms with war for Turner,

but others are not so fortunate.

Veterans have come back home from different wars

and they carry baggage home with them.

It's something you have to live with the rest of your life.

And so that's true with veterans in previous wars,

um, they may have adjusted in different ways, maybe through alcohol.

Maybe now it's through methamphetamines or marijuana or something.

I met a veteran recently who, when I asked him about what therapy he was getting, he just tapped

the side of his leg and you could hear the pills jangling.

And he said, "This is therapy. This is the therapy they're giving me."

Since 2002, the artists kennardphillips have been

collaborating to produce works in response to the Iraq War.

They deal predominantly with photomontage,

and their most famous image is this one of Tony Blair.

It's had a life of its own amongst campaigners,

but also amongst the press.

It's been bought by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

as the official portrait of Blair.

As part of their show Demo Talk,

they create a piece of live video art.

So, is this work about politics or about art?

It's art talking about politics.

The art in it is very important to us, it is

as important as it would be if we were painting apples, you know?

It's just that we are... Our subject is

the everyday life that's happening around the world.

Is the message that all war is bad?

Well, all war IS bad.

We're not putting strap lines on it, it's not propaganda.

We're not directing an audience's thinking.

And our subject matter, it is always direct politics.

We are using the symbolism of direct politics as we're using

heads of state, or the Financial Times as materials.

There is no...set message.

Coming into this space, what the audience watching television

will not be able to understand is the kind of smell of it.

The smell of burning, the smell of decay.

We made these burnt boards.

They're like pin boards, and burnt them outside our studio.

And then constructed the room out of the various boards.

And the shapes of them are totally based on what the burn did,

-we didn't actually do anything to them.

-Sculpt them.

So why is war such a perennial inspiration for creative minds?

I think most artists have a preoccupation with the most

extreme things of our lives.

Everyone is attracted to war because it's...

It put something naked of us being human.

There are some people who will be seduced by the beauty that

often shows up in the work.

And that's a really difficult, um, thing for an artist to do because

it makes me wonder whether or not I should put work out into the world.

Art is for humanity, it's creativity. In itself it is a vital thing.

And then if you feel like that as an artist, then you want to make

work about something that is killing people rather than living.

Early this year, trams finally arrived on the streets of

Edinburgh after a very long and controversial construction project.

They have been ferrying tourists and commuters

alike on the journey between the airport and the city centre,

and we've been treating passengers to some very special performances.

First, here's Simon Munnery.

BELL RINGS

I note the lice have finally conquered my eyebrows.

More fool them, it's only a matter of time before the hairline

recedes and they're left stranded.

And then what? Inbreeding, infighting?

Possibly at the same time.

But so is the vicious wars between the two rival colonies,

until, at last, with both follicular forests deluded,

they'll be forced to make a dash for it. But where?

South, along the wind battered bridge of the nose, perhaps to the seeming safety of the nostril,

only to be blown to kingdom come by the next volcanic sneeze?

Or east, towards the ear?

Hoping to navigate its infinite complexity without map

or compass, only to find a few dried tufts in a quagmire of wax.

And then, with all options exhausted, the lice will be forced back.

Back across the ever-widening desert of the void.

That's when I'll get them.

Thank you.

Simon Munnery Sings Soren Kierkegaard at The Stand,

here in Edinburgh, until next week.

Now if you have missed out on the global phenomena that is

Game Of Thrones, where on earth have you been?

The creator of the hugely popular fantasy series

and the writer of the books that spawned it, George RR Martin,

has been appearing at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

Thrones aficionado Grace Dent jumped at the chance to meet him.

This city always feels like a fantasy kingdom.

A Gothic film set where you might expect to meet a knight, a wench,

or perhaps even a dragon at any moment.

But now, more so than ever before...

..because this year Game Of Thrones has come to town.

George RR Martin's Song Of Ice and Fire books have sold 15 million copies worldwide.

And the subsequent TV series, Game Of Thrones,

has become HBO's most popular show of all time.

The series is set in a fantasy world, but one in which magic is kept

to a minimum and political intrigue takes centre stage.

It's not about elves or wizards, it's about people, politics and war.

And sex, of course. And violence.

And sex and more violence.

And death.

In my opinion, this is the greatest thing on television today

and I'm in Edinburgh to meet the man behind it all.

Does Scotland and its stories, does that influence your work at all?

Well, if by influence you mean have I pillaged Scottish

history for various scenes in Song Of Ice and Fire,

yes, definitely.

It was my 1981 visit to Hadrian's Wall that inspired my own wall.

Scottish history is wonderfully baroque and bloody and twisted

and strange, and there are many terrific incidents in it.

These books, these tales,

they've gone beyond the traditional fantasy audience.

They've grabbed a whole new... genre of people, me included.

-What can you... Can you pinpoint how you have done that?

-No!

I have no idea, but I am very glad.

But it's been a very strange ride here.

I think in part because of the TV series,

which has been enormously popular.

It's just one of those things

that occasionally happens when lightning flashes

down from the sky and something just becomes part of the culture.

British audiences can sometimes be slightly shocked at the sexual content of Game Of Thrones.

You get some people who're kind of clutching at the pearls, they're shocked.

HE LAUGHS

-How do you feel about complaints about sex?

-Um...

You know, you can always change the channel.

Sexuality is an important part of human life and part of all of our

lives and part of the lives of all of the people through history.

So I think leaving it out would be ridiculous.

Some of Thrones' most familiar faces have been popping up

across Edinburgh. Dame Diana Rigg is staging a one-woman show.

It's a rare enough thing...

a man who lives up to his reputation.

Leave her face!

I like her pretty.

And Jack Gleeson, otherwise known as King Joffrey,

one of the greatest baddies in TV history, is also in town,

performing with his group Bears In Space.

Hey, you know, I will have whatever he's having. But make it a double.

A double double?!

Sounds like you have something you want to forget, stranger. Twice.

LAUGHTER

There's, in the group, there are faces that audiences will never

have seen before and there are faces that are very recognisable.

Is that a help or a hindrance when selling tickets?

We're definitely doing it in the right way cos...

-The way we want to do it.

-The way we want to do it, yeah.

Because I think if we push that side of things,

we'd sell out every night

and it wouldn't be a problem.

But I think we're of the opinion that it might cheapen the show

somewhat, just to kind of cheaply...

-..associate the show with Game Of Thrones, or whatever.

-Yeah.

# You've got a new favourite show

# It's called Game Of Thrones...! #

But some performers are happy to jump on the Game Of Thrones bandwagon.

# Bum-bum-ba-ra-rum-pom ba-ra-rum-pom, ba-ra-rum-pom

-# Game of Thrones!

-Game of Thrones. #

-You so nailed it!

You nailed it, you guys! Get off stage.

There's a Game of Thrones The Musical called Winter Is Coming.

-HE LAUGHS There is? I didn't know that.

-Well, there is.

How do you feel about that, would you like me to get you tickets?

-THEY LAUGH

-Do you want to see this?

I feel a little shocked about that because I really own

the rights to, er... live performances of the material.

So I think there is some copyright infringement going on here!

-They haven't contacted you about it?

-No, this is the first I've heard of it.

You're breaking a hot news story here, Grace. HE LAUGHS

I mean, apart from the copyright issue, do you love this, or do you think, "That's my baby"?

The ones that really boggle me,

frankly, are not the parodies of the show or anything having to do

with the show, but the ones that are about me personally.

You know, at the San Diego Comic-Con there was

one guy selling a George RR Martin doll, which was pretty...freaky.

I'm not sure how I feel about that.

I think some of my more belligerent fans are probably using it for voodoo purposes.

Hi, how are you?

Although some fans are getting frustrated

waiting for the next instalment in the series.

George, in town for the book festival,

inspires huge devotion in his followers.

I can't quite believe that he's like a few hundred metres

from wherever we are right now. It is pretty special.

You know, he is such a fantastic weaver of a tale.

People just want to know what happens next, I guess.

Why is he wasting time here?

He should be at home frantically writing!

Are you comfortable with being so enormously famous and in demand?

I'm trying to find a word that isn't inner peace.

Actually, no. No, I haven't.

We came to the Fringe Festival, I think, just three or four years ago.

And one or two people recognised me the whole week that we were here.

Now I walk the streets and three or four people recognise me every block.

And it's, it's transformed my life...

..in ways that I'm not entirely comfortable with.

What message do you have for people who say, "Why is he sitting

"down here talking to Grace Dent when he should be writing the next book?"

HE CHUCKLES Yeah, well... I get that no matter what I do.

"Why is he watching football?" "Why is he eating dinner?"

"Why is he doing any of that stuff?"

You know, you have to live your life too.

And you can hear more from George RR Martin online at...

Now they do say that the old jokes are the best,

but could that be truer than you think?

Professor Mary Beard is coming to Edinburgh next week to give a talk on the kind of jokes

that tickled the Romans.

But are we really cackling at the same old jokes

they cackled at centuries ago?

And has our sense of humour really not changed very much?

Ably assisted by Simon Callow,

Mary went back in time to find out.

There's no place like Rome. There's no place like Rome.

Three men embark on a journey together -

an absent-minded professor, a bald man and a barber.

They stop overnight. So in case someone nicks their luggage, they decide that

one of them has to stay awake all night.

The barber is chosen.

Towards morning he gets bored,

so he shaves the absent-minded professor's head.

The absent-minded professor wakes up.

He says, "You idiot, you've woken up the wrong man."

LAUGHTER

That's an ancient Roman joke getting on for 2,000 years old.

Funny or not? I'm not sure.

But it certainly hits on one of the Romans' favourite joking targets -

bald men.

Not that they laughed at everything, mind you.

Blindness, that was definitely off limits.

Not so very different from us, I guess.

Wheelchair users, that's a no-no.

But there still are all kinds of human difference that we

think it's perfectly OK, for some reason, to crack a gag at.

Genetically, there is no difference between somebody

Irish, English, Scottish,

possibly Welsh... There's nothing.

LAUGHTER

The barber, the bald man and the professor joke

comes from an ancient Roman joke book.

260 gags that take us right to the heart of Roman laughter.

There are some distinctive Roman themes like eunuchs or slaves.

Chap goes up to another guy and he says to him, "Hey, that slave you sold me died."

"That's funny," the other guy says, "he never did that when I owned him."

Which I think must be the origin of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch.

There is some familiar ethnic-style jokes too,

not against Irishmen or Belgians, but against the unfortunate

and very stupid people of the city of Abdera.

A man from Abdera sees a champion runner being crucified.

"My," he says, "he's really flying now."

Crucifixion jokes don't tend to be our cup of tea,

but modern stand-up still thrives on bad taste.

Hi, lovely to see you.

-Give us a cheer if you're drinking.

-SPORADIC CHEERING

OK, about three people. I thought you were going to be my people,

I need you to know because I've had three glasses of this already.

But the baby's loving it.

-Relax, I'm not keeping it.

-LAUGHTER

Laughter isn't just fun, it can be very nasty, too.

Bad emperors loved nothing more than humiliating their dinner guests with practical jokes.

In fact, the main claim to fame of the Emperor Elagabalus

in the third century AD, was that he invented the whoopee cushion.

PHRRT!

There was sheer sadism too.

"Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha," laughs the Emperor Caligula.

The two men reclining on either side of him ask him what's the joke.

He says, "Oh, only the idea that I have just to click my fingers

"and I can have both your heads off.

"I find that funny. Ha-ha."

Very funny(!)

But the ordinary Romans used laughter against those in power too.

Everybody, it seems, was having to have a crack at Julius Caesar's bald patch.

Just like we lampoon our own politicians, I guess.

Who thinks that Michael Gove is the kind of man whose favourite

underpants are woven from Margaret Thatcher's chest hair?

There was a popular strand of ancient satire, too.

The best-known satirist in Rome was the poet Juvenal who

lived around 100 AD.

He was the original grumpy old man,

moaning about the modern world, about those immigrants who wouldn't learn Latin,

about women who were getting above themselves, and about how impossible

it was to live in a busy, noisy, filthy, traffic-jammed city like Rome.

If anyone laughed at Juvenal, it must've been his sheer grumpiness that set them off.

There's things you can't do when you've got a cardigan

and are a balding man. I don't know...

I've only got five minutes,

I'm wondering whether to be kind of angry or happy.

Cos they're the only two things I can do now. I've realised that.

Someone once said to me, "Sometimes you're a little bit miserable," "I said, no, I'm fucking not."

Some Roman jokes really are very hard to understand

and some, I bet, can't ever have been very funny.

I mean, in every culture there are more bad jokes than good ones.

But, actually, though we don't often realise it, we are still

telling some Roman gags.

My favourite example comes from an unlikely source,

that is Enoch Powell.

Enoch Powell always used to have his hair cut by the resident House of Commons barber,

who was a chatty type, who liked to tell politicians

what was wrong with the world and what they should do about it.

One day, Powell walked in and the barber said to him,

"How would you like your hair cut, sir?"

"In silence," Powell replied.

Even people who don't like Powell's politics have to admit that

that was a pretty neat joke.

What they don't realise is that it came straight from the Roman joke book.

Powell, of course, was a learned classicist

and he knew that the old ones are the best.

"Gavin, Gavin, are you a fan of pastiche?"

"I say, "Well, I prefer

-"sausage rolls. And I..."

-LAUGHTER

Laughter is a funny thing.

Try telling a joke in France

and you'll think it doesn't even travel across the Channel.

But, as Enoch Powell's joke with the barber shows,

in some ways it hasn't changed a bit.

Not in 2,000 years.

Mary Beard will be talking more about Roman comedy at the Assembly Rooms next Saturday

and her book Laughter In Ancient Rome is out now.

Simon Callow is at Assembly for another week.

Every year in Edinburgh there are shows which aim to shatter

stereotypes about sexuality and gender, often through burlesque and cabaret.

This year, though, the Fringe is offering something more, with a

range of performances examining the blurred lines of gender identities.

Psychotherapist Philippa Perry went to talk about artists and writers

who are pushing the envelope.

15 years ago when the Lady Boys Of Bangkok first came to Edinburgh,

they caused quite a stir.

These days, Fringe-goers expect a little bit more subtlety

and nuance when it comes to exploring gender identity.

Cross dressing and stripping on the Fringe may come as no surprise.

But feminist lap dancing,

art that documents the story of a couple who had surgery to

merge their genders, and men speaking women's

stories of everyday sexism and even rape, takes things to another level.

I met a guy recently and he was taking my clothes off in my kitchen.

He saw my armpits and there was this sort of...

-This sort of moment of surprise.

-Eugh!

In a world where a boxing promoter can come out about her gender

realignment surgery and apparently there's a male contemporary

artist who frequently wears dresses in public,

I hope we are becoming more used to the idea of fluidity in gender.

It just so happens that I am married to the aforementioned

contemporary artist with unorthodox sartorial taste.

Personally, I have always felt comfortable in my own gender,

but that is not the case for everyone.

Many feel pushed into fixed cultural identities and the exploration

of that territory is fertile ground for the arts.

BOTH: It's easy to compare myself to Amy.

I mean, I don't like to feel jealous or competitive,

but I guess it's a natural element of our relationship.

Amy and Rosana Cade are sisters.

In their own words, one a lesbian, the other a sex worker.

The show is a kind of exploration of female sexuality.

All sexuality in general,

but very much told through our own autobiographies.

We are looking at our relationship as sisters and as two women with,

perhaps on paper, quite different gender identities.

You describe this as a feminist show.

Could you tell me why it's a feminist show?

I spent, over the last 10 years,

working in various different parts of the sex industry

and kind of exploring what I think it is to be a feminist

in that area, and exploring my own sexuality.

I am painfully aware of how many people are forced into the sex

industry, and for them it is not a choice but sexual slavery.

However, this is not the way that I and many other people out there

encounter the profession of sex work.

From me, feminism is about...

more than just equality,

it's about people feeling free to express themselves

and their gender in whatever way is right for them

and to move away from kind of binary structures about a man

is like this, and a woman is like this.

So it encapsulates all human beings.

Within the show that's something that we are exploring, is

the choices that we make and how free we are to make those choices.

And I feel like we represent two people who are saying,

I am choosing this identity or this way of being that some people

might class as outside of what is normal or acceptable,

but for us, we're owning those choices.

From sisters exploring their sexuality,

to men going beyond the usual constraints of what is considered masculine.

MUSIC: "Wuthering Heights" by Kate Bush

# He told me I was going to lose the fight

# Leave behind my Wuthering Wuthering, Wuthering Heights

# Heathcliffe, it's me... #

Peter McMaster's production of Wuthering Heights is

a humorous devised piece with an all-male cast.

# Let me into your window... #

Why Wuthering Heights?

Originally, it was an experiment.

I was interested to see what would happen

if a group of men decided to do that.

But actually over the period of the process,

I've realised that this classic male archetype, which is almost 200 years

old, is probably quite an appropriate figure to compare ourselves with.

THEY SCREAM

You are so selfish for leaving me here!

I hope you won't be happy until you die.

I am never going to be happy now.

You'll just move on, find someone else, won't you?

What am I going to do if you're going to die?

Why did you come back?

Why all male?

Because I was interested in making a piece of work with and about men.

A few years back,

I was working on a performance that my partner was doing,

which was a big interrogation of feminism

and as much as I was supportive of it,

I also was wondering what my place

within that kind of dialogue could be.

It quickly felt like I didn't have...

a position in that, really, to contribute as fully.

MUSIC: "Hey Boy Hey Girl" by The Chemical Brothers

On the other side of town,

transgender performer and playwright Jo Clifford's latest show

is an ecclesiastical affair.

The Gospel According To Jesus, Queen Of Heaven,

is... Well, it's more or less what it says on the tin -

it's a presentation of the Gospel as if reimagined through the life

and the sayings of a transgendered Jesus, which is a who I play.

I love my mum.

My mum said...

let there be light.

And I say...

..I am the light.

I wanted to put on the show,

because so much of the prejudice that people like myself encounter

is, sadly, tends to be justified by Christianity, by the Christian faith.

And, in actual fact, it's anti-Christian,

there is nothing in the Gospels, nothing in what Jesus says

that justifies that and I just wanted to make that very simple point.

And our conception was immaculate because it happened through sex.

And sex, of itself, is innocent and pure.

Almost every other culture that's ever been in the world has understood

that there are more than two genders.

The West is really in a minority in this respect.

And almost everybody has areas in which they feel...

Well, they feel unsure about whether they're really a proper man or

they're unsure about whether they feel they're really a proper woman.

Hyah!

HE IMITATES A HORSE

'I think gender is a performance

'and I think it's distinct from our sex,'

and I suppose if we believe that gender is a performance

and that we're are all kind of...

..ascribing to a supposed way of being,

then perhaps, through performance, we can rework it, as well,

and I think that's part of the work of this project.

THEY ALL TALK AT ONCE

Now me! Now me! Now me!

Now me!

Hey-ya!

No, Nick.

Pull them up.

Time now for another trip through town on our tram,

this time in the company of the champion beatboxer Grace Savage.

SHE BEATBOXES

Drop the beat.

Beatboxer Grace Savage's show Blind

is at the Pleasance for another week.

Dance is always a highlight of the Edinburgh Festival

and this year is no exception with a host of dazzling productions

from around the world.

Strictly Come Dancing's most effervescent judge Bruno Tonioli

tiptoed his way around town

sampling some of the festival's finest footwork.

In the world of dance, there isn't much I haven't seen, done,

bought the T-shirt and the legwarmers.

I am always hungry for inspiration.

So I've come to the Edinburgh Festival

to catch some of the best dance from around the world.

Next week at the International Festival,

one of my heroines, the late, great Pina Bausch,

is celebrated as her company brings Sweet Mambo

to this year's programme. Unmissable.

But you don't have to wait for the International Festival

for a taste of really world-class dance.

THEY CHANT

THEY YELL

This year, New Zealand's leading dance company, Black Grace,

bring a distinctly South Pacific flavour to the Fringe with

a series of dances by their Samoan founder, Neil Ieremia.

Well, that was impressive.

Tell me a little bit more about the Samoan background,

because obviously it is something that is very important to you.

Sure. My parents taught me traditional dance

when I was young, it's just part of our culture.

Art isn't separate from life in Samoa, it's the same thing,

so everyone's a comedian, everyone's a singer,

everyone's a dancer, it's just part of your life.

The Fa'ataupati, the slap dance that I use in Minoi,

is something that I got taught at a very young age

and, because we have an oral tradition,

it's not written down, so it's very difficult to trace the roots.

I was asking someone once where they thought it came from

and they thought that it came from swatting away mosquitoes.

That's what they thought.

More, I think, it's about psyching yourself up for something,

like a war dance or traditionally what we have in New Zealand, a haka.

So that's some of the origin for the work.

There's a variation in the Gathering Clouds piece, in the Bach,

which is a knife dance performed by the chief's daughter,

-so it's a huge influence on my art.

-It's wonderful.

There's a little sequence, I call it the Flock Of Birds,

tropical birds, taking off.

Can you show it to me? Maybe I'll try to do it.

It's just...

That's it, open.

Ah!

-Oh, beautiful.

-And then you begin doing this. And a one and a two...

OK, that's more complicated.

BOTH: And a one and a two and a three and a four.

Oh, it's very fast.

And a one and a two and a three and a four.

Oh, I can join the company! I'm done.

The Barrowland Ballet hail from nearby Glasgow...

Morning!

..infuse ballet and contemporary dance

in their latest work, Tiger.

BRUNO GROWLS

GROWLING

Tiger centres on an ordinary family whose life is turned upside down

when something wild enters their life.

You're playing this very pivotal role

of the kind of slightly emasculated husband

and the fun-releasing tiger,

which some people would see as a scary monster,

but for me is actually all about the beauty and the excitement

and the unpredictability of life.

Well, I guess it's just two extremes.

Everybody's got an inner tiger, we just need to realise how to...

I know that.

Within these confines, it's a very rigid movement

and then when Tiger comes in,

he really starts interacting with the audience

and the movement's very much...

It's quite spontaneous.

The tiger, when he comes out, he's a little bit over the top,

-he pushes it a bit too far.

-I noticed that, yeah.

-It works extremely well.

-It should be a little bit frightening

and a little bit in your face, but without...

He never frightened me.

I don't know, maybe because I'm a bit of tiger myself.

The idea is that the set behaves like the tiger, as well,

it's got this sense of danger.

But also this, sort of, joy and the abundance of fruitiness.

At the beginning, it looks like something stifling and sinister.

And it ends up as a fairground.

Yeah, for me the cobweb effect is a really good analogy

for this idea that you think that you've got these four walls

and you've got to stay contained in them,

but in fact the walls don't really exist.

-You create your own walls.

-Yeah, exactly.

If unleashing your inner tiger isn't your thing,

you can always join in

with something a little bit more familiar.

Five, six, seven.

Oh, look at her movements.

MUSIC: "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" by Beyonce

Well, you see what we get in Edinburgh, a bit of everything.

'Everyone can learn to shake their ass almost like Beyonce.'

But, at this festival, there is something very cool to check out.

This August, an ice skating show is coming to the Fringe,

but Dancing On Ice it ain't.

French Canadian company Le Patin Libre have devised their show

to put paid to tired old notions of figure skating.

What was spectacular et vraiment excitant, amusant, different,

c'est le rock'n'roll on ice!

-Oui, un peu...

-I've got to go back to English now.

It kind of shakes the cobwebs a little bit.

I'm completely passionate about glide,

it makes me feel happy, that's the way I express myself.

But in the world of figure skating it's very, very conservative

and I wanted to try something else,

so I started this collective of people to experiment.

It's good. It's a bit like what happened with ballroom

when we came into the scene and we kind of made it...

approachable and acceptable.

In Canada, we're not allowed to dance.

-Dance is forbidden in public skating sessions.

-Forbidden?

-Yeah, it's completely forbidden.

-You're joking. I don't accept that.

But there are rules like you cannot hold hands, you cannot turn,

-you cannot raise your feet.

-Well, you cannot live then.

-Exactly.

Oh, listen, I like a rebel. Rebel, rebel!

The rope started as a technical research,

like the physics of skating are so interesting,

momentum keeps going and with that link between two humans,

something special happens and the rope is about that,

like pulling, like there's a conflict, but then there's harmony.

-But then embracing it and finally escaping it.

-Yeah.

BRUNO LAUGHS

As part of the show,

Le Patin Libre also invite the freshly inspired audience

onto the ice, to try out some cool moves for themselves.

I have a confession to make, I don't do ice.

I couldn't possibly risk these wonderful legs,

so I'll let the professionals show you how to do it.

Bruno Tonioli there, and you can see more of Black Grace online.

Now, think of a Ming vase

and you're likely to conjure up an object of great rarity and value,

but there's more to the Ming era than just exquisite porcelain.

A new exhibition at the National Museum

traces a period of

great social, economic and artistic transformation.

Lars Tharp, an expert in Chinese ceramics, guided me around.

The Ming Dynasty ruled from the mid-1300s

and was the world's largest and richest empire for three centuries.

Known as the Golden Empire, it was a time when the arts flourished.

The treasures in this collection tell of a cultural life

which went far beyond the iconic blue and white vase.

This beautiful scroll shows us the Forbidden City

and this signifies the arrival in a way of the Ming Dynasty.

It does, in Beijing. It had arrived years before, down in Nanjing,

which means "southern capital".

But the next emperor but one decided, "No, I want to go up north,"

so he did a replica in Beijing of what they'd built in Nanjing.

And this represents something that actually

is virtually unchanged today.

It's one of the great spaces in any human culture

and this functions as a celestial, imperial, administrative capital

for a good 700 years.

I have a theory that, in the minds of the people who designed this,

as well as the people walking up that avenue,

there was the Chinese character for "central".

It's a box with a line going through it,

and the character says zhong.

And the Chinese for China is Zhongguo,

the central kingdom. It is the centre of the centre.

-And all around us is the universe that they created.

-Absolutely.

The Ming was a period of huge social change

and was run by a powerful, educated elite.

So we have six very characterful portraits

of clearly very important men.

We're staring into the face of the Ming.

These are amazing portraits.

When I saw these, I thought it's very similar to the realism

you get in the Hans Holbein pictures of the inner court of the Tudors.

These were the absolute top so-called literati.

You're wondering, "Is he looking at us or are we looking at him?"

He was supposed to be one of the great connoisseurs of his time

and told people what was good and what was not good

in the artistic realm.

To become a member of this elite scholar class,

it was essential to pass a strict exam set by the emperor.

The exams they were sitting were to show that they were competent

in the Chinese classics, Confucius and others.

And they had to demonstrate their skill at composition,

but also through the use of the brush.

Amongst this literati class, the mastery of brush and ink

was essential and the art of calligraphy

was seen as the highest form of human endeavour.

These are classic brush pots.

The pots you keep your brushes in for writing letters,

for writing poems and above all for producing scrolls

like the ones we see here.

It's not the traditional, round bamboo shape.

No, it's made of bamboo and I suspect

to get it into that distorted form,

they probably put a girdle round a piece of bamboo

whilst it was actually growing.

It's carved to resemble a pine tree,

and just underneath

there are two cranes which represent conjugal fidelity and long life.

And this is carved by one of the most famous carving families

of the Suzhou area, one of those rare occasions where we actually

know who the artist, the craftsman who actually made this, was.

-That's fantastic. That is a very, very important object.

-Amazing.

The scholar artists using these pots were creating

quintessential landscapes of which

there are a couple of stunning examples in this exhibition.

But, for me, the show stopper is an object so small

it could easily be missed.

It's two centimetres long. What are we looking at?

Well, it's a little gold cicada, sitting on a leaf.

And it was found in a family tomb next to the skull

of one of the buried family.

The cicada is an emblem of long life, of immortality, in fact.

Cos the larva lives underground for four years before emerging

and then bursting out of its pupa, becoming this extraordinary bug.

It's sitting on a simple leaf.

Yeah, and the two materials, gold and jade,

are two incorruptible materials.

Jade is reckoned by the Chinese to be the purest form of matter.

And gold likewise does not tarnish.

You can see it looks as though it was made yesterday.

This is one of the most beautiful objects I've seen for a long time.

The Ming Dynasty saw a shift towards a market economy

and amongst its chief exports were the unique ceramics of the day.

Unsurprisingly, Lars has singled out an exceptional piece

from this collection.

Porcelain evolves in China and the thing they like about porcelain

is it's white and it sparkles.

Not only white, but also translucent.

-It's a domestic wine jar...

-With a beautiful, beautiful lid.

And the lid is the thing that always disappears.

But here you've got the whole thing

-and it's a lid in the... Can you see the veins on top?

-So it's a leaf?

It's a lotus leaf and the little button on top

is where they cut the stem off the lotus, so it's a beautiful wine jar.

Everybody talks about Ming jars and they are usually referring

to blue and white, and blue, as in this jar here,

is achieved by putting cobalt onto the vase

before you put the glaze on.

It then fires and it goes to that blueish colour.

But, at the same time, red, red is the colour of the Ming.

And they happened to discover that by putting copper oxide

onto the piece, if you're lucky, it fires to this spectacular red colour.

As the dynasty goes on, they are beginning to discover that there

are all sorts of other colours they can put on top of the glaze.

Really very, very sophisticated production.

In fact, there's a wonderful fish tank

which is decorated with a lotus pond scene

and among the lotus ponds there's three cranes.

They are painted in underglaze blue and when that stuff starts

hitting Europe in the late 1500s into the 1600s,

then Europe goes "What is this? We can't do this."

And we couldn't do it for another 250 years afterwards.

So we come to the ultimate experience of the exhibition.

And a map like none I've ever seen in my life before.

It's laid out here electronically, but this is the real deal.

This is a contemporary copy of the map presented by Matteo Ricci,

a Jesuit who had based himself in China,

hoping to convert the Chinese

and showing the Chinese what the West knew of the entire world.

A world which the Chinese thought was square.

But which Matteo Ricci told them, "No, it's a sphere,"

and this is a projection of a sphere.

And what does that actually tell us about the rest of the world?

Or what does that tell us about the Ming Dynasty?

This is a traditional European map

where there is an attempt at scale, of relative scale.

The Chinese weren't particularly interested in relative scale.

Actually, if you go to Beijing today, you buy a Beijing map,

it is impossible.

They only show important things are big and unimportant things are,

sort of, off to the side.

What does this exhibition reveal to us overall

about the extent and the power and the culture of the Ming Dynasty?

Well, the Ming Dynasty is the last indigenous Chinese dynasty.

So what we're seeing here, if you like,

is the last gasp of indigenous Chinese society.

The Ming begins to falter, through various reasons,

in the early 1600s and it officially comes to an end in 1644.

So what this exhibition represents, really, is the glory of the Ming.

Yeah. Yeah. And the taste.

Ming: The Golden Empire is at the National Museum Of Scotland

until October and you can see another exhibition of Ming artefacts

at the British Museum in London next month.

Time now for our final tram journey,

this time in the company of the Portuguese percussionists, be-dom.

The infectiously energetic be-dom

and they are at the Underbelly for one more week.

Now, as this is our last edition of Edinburgh Extra,

we wanted to leave you with some of our favourite shows.

There's more than a week to go at the Festival,

so, if you are in town, here are some of our discoveries.

Amazing grace and anarchic energy in the immersive circus event, Bianco.

Olwen Fouere's mesmerising tour de force, RIVERRUN,

adapted from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

Behold, he returns, renascenent, fincarnate,

still foretold around the hearth-side,

at matin a fact, foe purmanent, fum in his mow,

awike in wave risurging into chrest,

victis poenis hesternis, fostfath of solace,

earthlost that we thought him, pesternost, the noneknown warrior,

from Tumbarumba mountain.

Festival stalwart Lucy Porter's debut play,

The Fair Intellectual Club,

reveals the hidden female history of the Scottish Enlightenment.

'Tis my honour, as a humble clergyman's daughter,

to appear before a club of the most polite Scottish ladies.

We are not all Scottish. Of course, I am English.

Your mother is English.

And Englishness runs on the maternal line!

Not that I have anything against you Scottish ladies,

-although you are sometimes a little rough woven.

-The impertinence!

-A club...

-My family hails from a place where the ladies are famous

for their refinement, decorum and modesty -

the county of Essex.

LAUGHTER

And suddenly Will is transported into a palatial paradise,

where even his slightest whim can be actualised.

An old video tape conjures up humour and sadness

in the linguistically thrilling Stand By For Tape Back-Up.

The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air is exactly that,

a kind of hip-hop twilight zone.

And, whether you're in Edinburgh or not,

a political thriller you can download

to your smartphone or tablet, City Of The Blind.

You are life-savers. I really, really owe you one.

-Yeah, yeah.

-Now, spill, why are we here?

OK, so Francis Lang gave me these massive data sets.

We need to work our way through, find connections.

Someone really does not want this found.

-So that's the end of the road?

-No. I just need to go to Vienna.

She's right. It's the only option.

That's me for this year,

but do join Sue Perkins for Edinburgh Nights

on Friday on BBC Two at 10 o'clock.

And you can see more from the BBC at the festival at...

There'll be more performances added every single day.

We leave you tonight, though, with guitar legend Paco Pena

and his new show, Patrias, later this month,

which commemorates Federico Garcia Lorca

and the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Good night.