In her fourth outing as director of the Edinburgh International, star violinist Nicola Benedetti leans into what she knows best, which isn’t dance. But besides the headliner Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Ihsane (highlighted separately), the multidisciplinary productions entice. In Rwanda, the Bantu word ingoma means both “drum” and “throne” —fitting for the country’s first all-female drumming circle, a practice long exclusive to men. The women of Ingoma Nshya pound their tall drums while jumping into the air, thrashing their heads right and left, and ululating. The Glaswegian collaborative GroupWork time-travels to the 1950s for When Prophecy Fails, which takes up the first UFO doomsday cult to preach salvation via flying saucer. The recent but already-acclaimed production proceeds like a fever dream, with the players moving mutely within an aural landscape of Cold War pop tunes and radio alerts. (Prophecy tours Scotland this autumn). Most otherworldly is the 10th-century Arab epic Bilali, a mythical history as rife with tribal warfare and arduous desert treks as the Bible. Traditionally, a bard from a family of bards would intone the epic for as long as four days. The Palestinian performance ensemble Khabashi, from Haifa, have limited themselves to three hours for a brightly surreal dance-theatre rendition. —Apollinaire Scherr