Traditional Gaelic song and contemporary music are performed against a backdrop of vintage and modern film.
For thousands of years the birdmen of St Kilda scaled the cliffs and sea stacks that make up the most remote part of the British Isles. Barefoot, ropes knotted round their waists, they would climb the stacks jutting out of the Atlantic like the ocean's own skyscrapers, Conachair rising higher than the Empire State Building.
This year's Festival focuses not just on the Enlightenment, but on on a number of unsung heroes and unsung ideas that reflect Scottish culture.
St Kilda, Island of the Birdmen uses contemporary and traditional music about an island that was so environmentally depleted by 1930 that it would no longer have human habitation, the island of St Kilda, the most westerly part of Scotland.
It's a large-scale multimedia opera. The skills of the Birdmen are re-imagined as an awesome aerial ballet, filmed on the island and projected on to two large screens onstage. Dancers suspended on ropes drop from and bounce off vertical rock faces. Cameras sweep over the mountains which are the hunting grounds of the Birdmen.
In front of these screens, actors, singers and acrobats tell the story whilst the small, lone figure of Alyth McCormack, a native of nearby Lewis, represents the spirit of the islands, and most beautifully sings traditional songs from St Kilda. She guides us through the stories of life, loss and finally evacuation on the morning of 29 August 1930 when the last 36 inhabitants of St Kilda boarded the boat for the mainland.
This a Belgian/French collaboration with the Gaelic Arts Agency; mostly in Gaelic and French and where English is used it's a curious and difficult accent to pick up. The director, Thierry Poquet, is yet again a master of spectacular theatre.
An operatic dirge ideal for linguists but nevertheless educational, musical and gripping throughout.
Times: 15-17 August, 8pm