In one way it was an until next year goodbye hug, in another way it was a laboratory assortment of works that couldn't be squeezed into Dance Base's initial extravaganza of 10 different programmes in a day. But however you care to look at it, the (now ended) run of performances under the umbrella title ... and then some' was a fine reminder of how flexible and open-minded this venue is in defining a dance-work. And talking of umbrellas, it rained, and then some, a during the two outdoor performances I saw last week.

Actually the downpour added something unexpectedly poignant to Oceanallover's Feather Mammy (****). As the four barefoot, raggle-taggle figures edged and juddered into the Grassmarket, their slow - and heavily burdened - progress up the steps towards the Dance Base roof garden took on a sodden, chilling aura of endurance and determination. Hair became plastered to skull, the ritual pigments, part of elaborately emblematic costuming, drizzled down bodies and clothes trickled water down bare limbs. But, as if lured by chiming musical sounds, they kept going. Only laying down their baggage of bedrolls in the safe (albeit squelching) grassy haven of the venue's top level. As an image of survival, migration and eternal journeying, it was genuinely affecting, and while Alex Rigg and his companions slogged on, passers-by were certainly stopped in their tracks.

A similar "who the... What the..." response greeted Ian Smith and Brian Hartley when they braved the rain with Beastly Beauty (***) . Hartley, who was also in Feather Mammy, lay, a dead matador in full regalia on a sled while Smith, as a cigar-chewing bull, dragged him up and down the Grassmarket. Like much of what Smith's own company, Mischief La-Bas, does throughout the year this was a witty disruption to the normal run of things - some folk were tickled by the image, others were puzzled but took photographs all the same while a few simply pretended they were not seeing things.

Smith and Hartley re-appeared later in the day for Moving Stories for Bedtime (HHHHH). Smith's 50th birthday has set him thinking, and thinking back. So while he prepared to snooze off, in a wee bed installed in the men's shower-room, we opened randomly chosen lockers and then read him the memories he'd stored there. At the other end, Hartley - a white wraith in body paint, half-clad in a plastic shower curtain - coiled, stretched, wrenched and capered in spontaneous response to the spoken words, which Smith claimed back from us and shredded.

The cumulative effect of this process was complex and affecting: Hartley, manifesting like a sliver of seance-ectoplasm, Smith not just reliving intensely private memories but sharing them with strangers, then, like the whole business of forgetting or half-remembering, shredding them into something new, such as the filling for his coverlet. This moving, evocative piece has to find a billet in other venues. And it would be good to think that Michael Popper's collaboration with Nigel Osborne - Remembering.... Forgetting (****) - had a future beyond this Fringe. Using fragments of wistful poetry by Esenin (perhaps better known as one of Isadora Duncan's husbands), Popper has devised a brooding vignette of live music and movement where his own bass voice and muscular sinuosity, backed by cellist Clea Friend, conjures up mesmerising images of a soul on the brink of suicide, reminiscing and saying farewell.

Matthew Hawkins (****) was the poised and elegant highlight of the Heads Up programme with his idiosyncratic melding of balletic details and contemporary quirks, all imbued with a lissome lightness that is a pleasure to watch. Unsung (***) was a bold, ambitious and knowingly subversive, modern twist on the traditions of Irish music and dance. Liz Roche's choreography took the motifs of social dancing and - using two couples - upended and re-ordered them, tweaking familiarity with a vocabulary of contemporary movement while live music, composed and led by Michael O' Suilleabhain, brought a similar honouring and refreshing to old airs and vocal graces. As a reflection of how small nations try to assimilate or re-invent their cultural heritage, this was a canny piece of work.

This need to experiment was the driving force for a double bill, Grounds/Re-memberings (***) that explored the creative possibilities that lie in the dialogue between live musicians and dance-makers. Violinist Poppy Ackroyd was the responsive sounding board for Maite Delafin's sorting-through of inner tensions in Grounds while Sue Hawksley - with the collusion of the other ensemble - set up improvisational challenges for herself and a quartet of female dancers.

Spoken directions for movements became, like the shifting timbres of the music, an encouragement to take risks. Not unlike the whole of this August season at Dance Base which, like Hawksley's piece, was also full of really rewarding outcomes.