Most artist biographies puff and spin, but surely few lay claim, as Australian choreographer Lewis Major’s does, to being ‘the only artist presenting work at the Fringe who can reverse parallel park a tractor.’ It’s a bold assertion. Has it been tested? ‘Maybe not the only one in Scotland,’ Major says over Zoom. ‘I should be careful. Ok,’ he corrects himself, ‘who can reverse parallel park a tractor and has danced with Hugh Jackman and worked in all three Axis-Of-Evil countries.’ Well, fair enough.

There’s more than irreverence though to that tractor claim in Major’s biography. A multi-award-winning choreographer (he won The List’s Best Adelaide Show last year) with a slew of world tours behind him, Major is fiercely proud of his background, which is as far as possible from the middle-class cultural milieu that surrounds contemporary and classical dance. ‘I grew up on a farm in the deep south of regional South Australia,’ he says. ‘And I mean like, deep south.’ He attended a bush school, built ‘in the middle of nowhere,’ until the age of 13. ‘They didn’t have enough teachers so we’d be learning over the phone, things like that. The tyranny of distance is a real thing. Cultural and geographical isolation is a real thing in Australia.’

Major had never been to a theatre until he was 16, when Australian Dance Theatre came to a town nearby. He still remembers the show, Birdbrain by Garry Stewart. ‘They were doing gymnastics, launching themselves in the air and landing on the floor and rolling out of it. And it was very crazy.’

Two years later, he decided he wanted to become a professional ballet dancer. It would be nice to say the rest is history, but as Major has learned, nothing is plain sailing in the arts. A combination of injuries (a broken back at ballet school and a car accident some years later) hampered his own stage career but also pushed him in the direction of choreography. Now he runs his own dance company, promoting the work of other choreographers as well as staging his own productions and, for the second year running, he’s bringing to the Fringe a culmination of his life’s work as a creator, Triptych Redux. The triple-bill show was a sell-out last year, featuring pieces by both Major and his mentor Russell Maliphant. This time around, however, not only is the line-up entirely Major’s own, but he will also be performing for the first time in ten years.

‘I wanted to dance because it meant something to me.’ Having been told after breaking his back that he would never return to the stage, he has now found himself in the right place with the right team to make it happen. ‘There’s something about being really well supported by House Of Oz,’ he says. ‘And I’ve never felt that in my entire career. I’ve never felt that sort of support. It’s given me the feeling of “I should do this, maybe one last time.”’

Describing himself as ‘staunchly regional,’ Major prides his company on touring the kind of areas where he grew up, where access to theatre can still be scarce. ‘The great thing about working regionally is that you can’t be a wanker,’ he says. ‘You can’t get away with going to pull the wool over someone’s eyes.’ Ultimately he believes the important messages in art will communicate, whatever your exposure. ‘If I could say anything about the sort of work I want to make, it’s universal. It’s about being human and it’s supposed to be a balm for what it is to be human. Because we’re all suffering, we all fall in love, we all get broken hearts, we all watch our parents die, we all get sick. Art is a balm for that.’

Triptych Redux, Zoo Southside, Friday 1–Sunday 24 August, 9.30pm.