The American choreographer Trisha Brown, a giant of postmodern dance, was the best represented artist of the international festival’s too-small – but relatively choice – dance programme. Scottish Ballet presented one of her works as the centrepiece of its new triple bill like a gift. Brown’s own company arrived the following week with a strong evening that spanned three decades of a career marked by seriously creative play.

Set and Reset, made in 1983, coupling Robert Rauschenberg’s designs with Laurie Anderson’s pulsating original score, was Brown’s breakthrough piece. A limb-swinging septet in pyjamas that resembled transparent newsprint ricocheted like pinballs beneath a levitating set of geometric projection screens. Operating from a slippery state of thoroughly disciplined relaxation, the dancers gathered and scattered like unstrung beads. The deceptively loose bounce and ease of their movement was a balm.

Fast-forward 20 years to Present Tense, in which Brown again showed how daring but rewarding it is to be simple. This was a dreamy child’s drawing of a dance, but one fashioned from an adult sensibility. It was choreographed like visual art, with an unadorned instinct for space, shape and line.

The music was a handful of John Cage’s prepared piano pieces whose quirky, toy-like mechanics set a tone of delicate inquiry. The dancers, casually clad by Elizabeth Murray in red and yellow, cavorted against her backdrop of blocky orange and green figures beneath a lowering blue coil of a cloud. Individuals were upended and revolved in a gentle defiance of gravity. Bodies were used like stepping stones, climbing gyms, rocking chairs or launch pads. The final impression was that these stress-free, exploratory games would continue even after the curtain had come down.

This year the festival has cast a spotlight on the myth of Orpheus, highlighting the 400th anniversary of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, a work that Brown directed a decade ago. Canto/Pianto (Italian for song/lament) is a distillation of that work, staged as an episodic series of stark, stylised scenes that carry an aura of ritual. These excerpts may have seemed unsatisfying as a narrative, but then storytelling was never Brown’s intention here (nor her interest at any time). What we were left with was a kind of minimalist glimpse of L’Orfeo, anchored by a breathtakingly simple solo from Judith Sánchez RuÍz. Planted centrestage in a coppery brown sheath and against vivid red light, the Cuban-born dancer executed gestures and assumed positions that were at once dramatic, iconic and sculptural.