3/5

RAMBERT are one of the country’s leading contemporary dance companies but this mixed programme does little to uphold its reputation.

The bill opens promisingly with Dark Arteries, a piece inspired by a Mervyn Peake poem about coalmining and which features a live brass band. Yet if this suggests the grinding physicality of heavy industry, then Mark Baldwin’s choreography is fractured and confusing.

Its three sections move from pre-industrialism to the physical and emotional marks left on the country’s landscape by commerce.

But while there’s tension in the mid-section, with Gavin Higgins’s score ever more dissonant as the dancers move in seething ensembles, there’s no sense of emotional involvement.

This dry academic approach also undermines Shobana Jeyasingh’s Terra Incognita. Presented in three parts, it was “inspired by ideas and images of journeys, difference and distance.”

The movements are frequently abrasive, with women contorted on the floor while men swagger, but its plodding pace fails to capture the swashbuckling energies of European land exploration.

It’s left to company favourite Rooster to offer any real emotional engagement or sense of physical playfulness.

Choreographed by Christopher Bruce, the piece uses eight songs by the Rolling Stones to celebrate the 1960s and remonstrate with the era’s male chauvinism.

Here men cock and strut like roosters while women watch with amused disdain. The lyrics are occasionally acted out but more often Bruce captures their spirit as feather boas are shaken and fingers wagged.

Performed with an exuberance that’s absent in the two previous pieces, it’s a reminder of the technicality and physical beauty that made the company’s name.

Tours until February 19, details: rambert.org.uk