Pomegranates Festival

Jonzi D, Jim Mackintosh, Cera Impala

This year the festival’s choreographer in residence is MC, dancer, spoken word artist and director Jonzi D who is widely recognised for his influence on the development of the UK British hip hop dance and theatre scene. As choreographer in residence Jonzi D will be working with 20 Edinburgh-based traditional dancers who will perform alongside him on Monday 29 April and showcase their work as part of the festival’s International Dance Day celebrations. Working alongside Jonzi D to create this new dance piece will be poet Jim Mackintosh who is author of We are Migrant; poet, playwright and BBC broadcaster Ian McMillan; and contemporary visual artist and human rights activist Mare Tralla.

Another highlight this year will be a newly-devised showing of Elegies, which premiered during the Scottish International Storytelling Festival 2023. This performance, which weaves together dance theatre, spoken word, and live music, is a dance adaptation of the poetry book Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (1948) by Hamish Henderson(1919-2002), a soldier-poet, singer-songwriter, and scholar-folk revivalist of Scotland. Set in a dancehall and a desert during the Second World War, it embodies ceilidh, jive, swing, and lindy hop, accompanied by Henderson’s poems read by spoken word artists Morag Anderson and Stephen Watt, and live music and vocals from multi-instrumentalist Cera Impala.

Plus, there will be a talk by Rudiger Hess, President of Europeade who will give an overview of the history of Europeade which is the largest festival of folk dance and music held in a different European country each year, whilst on an initial visit to Scotland to explore the possibility of various cities hosting the 61st edition in 2026.

The festival will also include two new exhibitions - Dance Around the World (3-30 April) a display of traditional dance books and artefacts from Scotland and beyond, at Edinburgh’s Central Library accompanied by craft maker-led hands-on workshops; and Vengefully Changed Allegiance by Alison Harm (23-30 April) which looks at the role of tartan in traditional dance. Alison, who is a Scottish fashion designer and the owner of clothing label Psychomoda, will also present a catwalk-style fashion show of her sustainable tartan creations on the evening of 25 April.

Over the festival weekend there will be a choice of curatorial tours of the exhibitions, as well as two specially-commissioned tours of Edinburgh's Old and New Town’s dance history, looking at the underrecognised female dance teachers of the past, with writer and storyteller Donald Smith and dance historian Alena Shmakova.

For the first time the festival will run a Family Day featuring a ceilidh for all led by Caroline Brockbank of CeilidhKids, and a matinee showcase by traditional dance artists who are in residence at primary schools across Edinburgh and the Lothians, and Bulgarian and Ukrainian language schools in the city.

Disabled Facilities: Accessible venues and toilets