Letter from Edinburgh: India casts its spell

By MIKA

Here I am at the 56th annual Edinburgh Festival, my fifth time at the event. This is Scotland's pride and the world's largest arts festival. There are 1000 shows a day - and that includes the Military Tattoo with a cast of 3500 and 400 horses.

To give you a sense of the festival's size, box-office sales for the Fringe alone amount to the whole population of Auckland buying a ticket. Imagine. This is truly the Olympics of performance. Over the next month Scotland's capital enjoys an explosion of arts, and I hope to share the most interesting gems with you.

Today my company and I entered our festival venue, Dance Base, the Scottish National Centre for Dance. It was powhiri Scottish style with bagpipes and karanga in strange harmony. We called our haka, taonga were exchanged and hongi shared.

Then the best bits happened all over again for the camera .

No bother - this is Edinburgh after all, and with 666 acts looking for column inches it's good to be unique, and even better to be snapped.

What's hot this year is India and its monster Bollywood movie machine. You might have caught TV One's Goodness Gracious Me or The Kumars at No 42, but for the uninitiated who don't know the joys of the world's biggest cinema scene, just imagine Hollywood in India - only it's Hollywood where Busby Berkeley is a living god.

You see, all movies born in Bombay feature endless dance numbers, impossible costume changes and no sex.

The Traverse Theatre, which once debuted Pinter and Mamet, are going for the full effect with a specially commissioned Hindi show, Sohaila Kapur's Yeh Hai Mumbai Meri Jaan. The critics have the production lined up as this year's big hit.

Kapur's brother is Andrew Lloyd Webber's new writing partner. It's a measure of things that Webber closed Cats to open his homage to Bollywood, Bombay Dreams.

Meanwhile, the International Festival (the posh bit) celebrates the Russell Crowe of India, Shah Rukh Khan, star of Asoka - a sort of Gladiator with songs, available at any good Indian video rental store.

The real "hit you between the eyes" surprise of the International Festival, though, is a one-woman show by Pritham Chakravarthy, whose dialogues about Indian caste injustice tell the tale of the hijras, or eunuchs.

With Edinburgh practically marrying Delhi it's a real shame our very own Jacob Rajan isn't here with Krishna's Dairy. Maybe he was the pebble that began this avalanche, for brown really is the new black. Here's hoping it works in our favour.

Torotoro and I are up against the Royal Ballet of Flanders' dark rendition of Swan Lake, and Bounce, a street dance sensation playing at my former festival home, the Assembly. Still, we have made the dance Top 5 in the hit predictions of the eminent festival bible The List.

Not bad for a show Creative NZ didn't support.

Shame really. In the midnight sun of a Scottish summer I can truly see there is room for a Polywood up here.