Dance moves into choppy waters

Celebrities have been merrily stowing away bubble bath and electrical aides on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs for decades, but can shallow luxuries really get to the heart of who we are?

Not if you're Wendy Houstoun, dancer extraordinaire, who is putting her own idiosyncratic spin on the castaway theme with new solo show Desert Island Dances.

Houstoun's peerless mix of comedy and tragedy diced with dance has won her a cult following with shows such as Haunted, Daunted and Flaunted (a trilogy no less).

She now turns her needlesharp gaze on the way the physical gestures we make, hotwired into our DNA, say more about us than a thousand words ever can. That may sound heavy-going for a dance performance but Houstoun is blessed with the quicksilver wit of a top stand-up comic.

Having cut her teeth in key roles with influential physical theatre ensemble DV8, Houstoun has flowered into one of the unsung treasures of the British dance scene, artfully poking fun at an artform that's often in danger of disappearing up its own backside.

Houstoun injects a dark vein of subversive humour into work which, intimately autobiographical in tone, brilliantly dismantles the distance between star and audience. Now, taking the estimable BBC Radio 4 show as her launch pad, Houstoun voyages into the choppy waters of making sense of all the moves she's made (and life itself) by deciding which dances she'd take to her very own desert island. You'll end up not drowning but laughing.

Tonight and tomorrow, Purcell Room, South Bank SE1, 8pm, £13. Tel: 0870 380 0400. www.sbc.org.uk Tube: Waterloo/Embankment