My Edinburgh fringe odyssey: ‘The nudity is expressive, shocking – sometimes harrowing’

In a year that’s seen the British actor star in the season’s two biggest blockbusters – and marry his co-star from both – he is reportedly earning a huge pay packet thanks to box-office bonuses The British actor Tom Holland is expected to “make at least $100m” for starring in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, according to the Wrap. Unnamed sources “with knowledge of Holland’s deal” say he was paid $20m (£15m) upfront, about double what he reportedly received for his previous Spider-Man film No Way Home in 2021. But the extraordinary success of Brand New Day at the global box office means the 30-year-old is expected to earn another $80m or more in backend bonuses...

With brute strength and beauty, party tricks and personal revelations, this year’s dance and circus programme has ambition and a spirit of togetherness If you want to be wowed by technical prowess, I recommend taking a trip to see a couple of New York pole dancers, Donna Carnow and Gina Alm, in their Edinburgh fringe show Dusk/Night/Dawn. The pair are wildly impressive performers with just one piece of apparatus, a hanging pole suspended above the stage, on which they climb and spin and balance seemingly on thin air and origami their limbs into impossible shapes, swimming and spiralling through the shadows in mesmerising fashion. What they demonstrate is absolute mastery of their art, Carnow especially – a former dancer and US Pole Art champion. The movement is utterly fluid, despite the brute strength required; the physics of it is so finely tuned but you’re unaware because you’re lost in the flow. That’s what a great performer does, and Dusk/Night/Dawn is in part about performance. At one point their two bodies are writhing under flashing red light, smeared with black paint, and then suddenly the lights come up and it’s like waking up, they’re wiping themselves down, the act’s over. There are all sorts of slippery questions about the dissolving line between person and performer, the nature of fantasy, the pleasure of discovering the power of your own body, and there’s also just the awesome talent...

Scotland’s Thea Musgrave is still writing radical music with perambulatory soloists and a message of hopefulness. Her latest work, for bassoonist Amy Harman, comes to the Proms this weekend Thea Musgrave is a phenomenon. Born in Scotland in 1928, the composer has lived in the US since the early 70s, but has lost none of her accent, her infectious optimism, and her drive to keep writing. As she told me from her home in California, with a joyfully rolling laugh, “I’ve got to this age, and from now on I’m going to do what the fuck I want to do”. That includes her latest opera, on Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando – Orlando: An Escapade – which will premiere at the Buxton festival next year, and a new bassoon concerto for Amy Harman, Out of the Darkness, which you can hear at the Proms this weekend, on 23 August. The bassoon concerto develops one of the central innovations of Musgrave’s life and career, which she’s still intensifying and exploring in her 99th year: what she calls her “dramatic-abstract” approach to her orchestral compositions, in which the players aren’t a single collective told what to do by a conductor’s gestures, but instead are released as individual characters and identities...