Coffee-Table Notes

Theatrical con-men are everywhere in Edinburgh at this time of year. All it needs is a change of hat, a stick-on moustache and a penchant for talking up attributes you haven't got, and Bob's not so much your uncle as anyone you want him to be. This is a trick Lorne Campbell's Greyscale company explore to the max with their show, Sandy Grierson Will Lecture, Dance and Box. Hang on a minute, though. When Campbell and playwright Selma Dimitrijevic first co-directed a version of the show at Oran Mor last year, wasn't it called David Ireland Will Lecture, Dance and Box? And aren't Grierson and Ireland both noted actors on the Scottish theatre circuit? And what on earth has Swiss-born proto Dadaist prankster Arthur Cravan to do with anything? The answers to all these questions probably won't be found by going to see the work in what sounds like a curious way of doing business. “Arthur Cravan had about a hundred and twenty identities,” Greyscale artisti

At various times over the last three years, in Canada, Australia, America and Ireland, a very special dance has been set in motion. Entire rooms full of revellers have launched into spontaneous displays of the alphabet-shaped choreography that accompanies evergreen 1970s disco smash, Y.M.C.A. This song, made famous by The Village People, a group of young men extravagantly dressed up as various macho archetypes, may be a staple of late-night clubland cheese-fests across the globe anyway, but this is different. The extrovert activity described above exploded out of Dance Marathon, a four-hour participatory endurance test cum endorphin enhancing Dionysian rite cum life-changing piece of social engineering devised by the Toronto and New York-based experiential theatre explorers, bluemouth inc. As Dance Marathon shimmies into Edinburgh for a limited run as part of the Traverse Theatre's programme, the show has has proved so apparently transformative for its audience that

Underbelly@Your Lounge Neil Cooper 3 stars If living rooms could talk, they might well end up looking and sounding a bit like this intimate little display by Australian duo Stuart Bowden and Wil Greenway. Designed to be portable enough to be performed around town in your very own des res, Bowden and Greenway's compendium of darkly comic yarns takes advantage of such up close intimacy with their sofa-bound audience that, even on a Thursday teatime with light pouring through the windows of a Tollcross tenement, there's an infectious charm about what unfolds. It begins with a poem about a rug named Keith, a household item consistently walked over and ignored by all who pass through the household, but whose cosiness cannot be faulted. So by the time the Fabulators themselves arrive in the vintage suits and facial hair of their alter egos Anderson and Finn, we're lulled into a false sense of security about what is about to unfold. With assorted props and toy f

4 stars Smoother than they once were, Edinburgh's premier lo-fi power-popsters nervertheless come on like some unreconstructed missing link between Swell Maps and Pavement, their urgently scuzzed-up melodies bouncing along with an unashamed fondness for squiggly-wiggly guitar lines pumped along by a drummer who thwacks his kit around the room a post-modern Keith Moon who can't find the swimming pool. With such a pot-pourri of conflicting sounds slugging it out over a selection of everyday art-school laments, this gloriously messy melange of oddball nonsense is the aural equivalent of falling down a spiral staircase, grinning as you go. The List, August 2011 ends

Edinburgh Printmakers until September 3rd 3 stars Drip, drip, drip go the variations on a theme that forms the quartet of works culled from Ian Davenport's 'Etched Puddle' series, in which assorted rainbow-arrayed, candy-striped, multi-coloured streams trickle down into a similarly hued liquid carpet at the bottom of each frame. Seen together, they appear playfully and trippily retro, recalling the opening credits of groovy 1970s teatime alternative to 'Blue Peter', 'Magpie'. In the next room, something similar occurs in one of Julian Opie's four 'Japanese Landscapes', a series of three-dimensional reflective treats akin to old-time breakfast cereal free gifts. This is print-making, Jim, but not as we know it, and it's perhaps telling that both Davenport and Opie are former students of Michael Craig-Martin, whose other, so-much-to-answer-for Goldsmiths alumni include the YBA generation of self-styled art stars. Davenport's

Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh until October 2nd 4 stars Inverleith House has long carved a niche for itself as a champion of late twentieth century American icons, and for the gallery's British Art Show contribution has gathered up a grab-bag of thirty-seven works made between 1982 and 1998 by Abstract Expressionism's original skip-diving grease monkey. This late-period collection is a fast-moving mixture of shine-buffed collages and rust-laden sculptural detritus, as if junkyard and garage had been stripped bare after some Ballardian multiple pile-up on the freeway, then the component parts put back together again on some customised Frankenstein's dragstrip as ornamental signposts forever in motion. Twisted road-signs are heaped together, connecting up neighbourhoods and no-go areas that one would only normally be just passing through. A giant pig is draped in neck-ties. A windmill made of metal strips dominates one room as if oil was

Queens Gallery, Edinburgh until January 15th 2012 3 stars There's something of an inky-fingered Durer overload in the 'burgh just now. Following on from Durer's Fame over at the National Galleries, this sixteenth century compendium of more than a hiundred works uses his output as a springboard for the burgeoning of religious reform and free artistic expression across the continent tellingly illustrated on the 1500 map at the top of the stairs with the British Isles dominating. Not that there's anything from dear old blighty in evidence across the three sections of the show, which begins with Durer, moves on to peers such as Lucas Cranach and co, finishing with portraiture by Holbein that could be storyboarding 'The Tudors.' Durer's output remains the most compelling work on show, from his religious iconography that is the equivalent of pop star pin-ups, with Saints Jerome, Anthony and Eustace a kind of ecclesiastical Take That, to his pen-and