Can you dig it? Transports Exceptionnels by French choreographer Dominique Boivin. Photograph: Jean-Louis Fernandez
Dance Umbrella 2007 opens on Wednesday - the first festival directed by Betsy Gregory after Val Bourne's long and seemingly definitive reign.
When Bourne's retirement was announced last year, there were many who argued that Umbrella should go with her. Some thought it had outlived its function - the profile of modern dance having been raised so successfully that the art form no longer needed packaging into a festival. Some felt it had become so comprehensive (even embracing a Paris Opera season at Sadler's Wells) as to be confusing. Others argued that it should continue, but should either be scaled right back, to become a smaller and more experimental venture, or else be given over to a succession of individual curators who could give it a different stamp each year.
In fact, Gregory's first programme falls, adroitly, somewhere between these options. It is certainly smaller; there are fewer splashy foreign guests, and only one work appearing on the Wells stage - an experimental venture by Russell Maliphant and the film artist Isaac Julien. There is also a sprinkling of more idiosyncratic events - I imagine there will be a large and curious audience to see what's become dubbed "the digger man solo" (Dominique Boivin's duet for dancer and mechanical digger at the Southbank Centre).
Still, I think the jury is out as to where Gregory should take Umbrella from here. The festival still has to define its place and function in what has become a fast evolving scene.
