Extreme emotion drives debut

This is Christopher Bruce's last season as artistic director for Rambert, a company he has been associated with in various guises for more than 40 years, and this programme allows us to look backwards, as well as forwards. Both views are encouraging.

The evening starts quietly with Siobhan Davies's Sounding, created for Rambert in 1989. It is perhaps the eccentricity of the music that does not permit the audience to engage fully with Davies's lucid but inward-turning choreography. The dancers are elegant but solipsistic, caught up in their own worlds as composer Giacinto Scelsi was in his mind games.

Jiri Kylian's pas de deux Blackbird is equally remote. Set to traditional Georgian folksongs, it ends jarringly in mid-note, without resolution. This is something Christopher Bruce could never have done. Musical to the core, his Grinning in Your Face takes songs arranged by Martin Simpson and paints for us a rural community in the mid-20th century. In a few deft strokes, he creates a retro, country feel, while using a pure contemporary dance vocabulary. He does not need to delineate precise situations for us to feel part of this community: the women work together, dance together, laugh together; with the men their relationship is more formal. Each character is clear, whether it's Conor O'Brien's hick-ish suitor, with a wonderfully sleek batterie, or Paul Liburd's elegant, sensual partner in a dreamily erotic reverie. This is probably the only production ever to feature the humble cardigan as an essential prop.

Wayne McGregor's PreSentient now has its London debut. To Steve Reich's driving Triple Quartet, McGregor has created an edgy interior mindscape, full of doom and foreboding. After an electronic introduction, not hugely successful, a grey drop that has cut the stage in half rises to reveal a dozen lavender-clad dancers staring accusingly at the audience. A lightning-flash of white light bathes them for an instant, and Reich's score begins: it is a dramatic opening to a fine piece.

McGregor's particular talent is to group and shape large numbers of dancers into a coherent and beautiful whole, creating sculptural effects both individually and en masse. His choreography is extreme, yet always driven by music and emotion, never simply gymnastic. Ana Lujan Sanchez and Rafael Bonachela's ferociously complex pas de deux shows just how natural even the most extreme extensions can be when music and dance fuse as one.

The Rambert Dance Company is performing at Sadlers Wells until 16 November. Box office: 020 7863 8000.

Rambert Dance Company: Sadler's Wells Autumn 2002