Phoenix has proved a prophetic name for the Leeds-based company, given the number of times it has been reborn and rebranded during the past 21 years. Under new director Darshan Singh Bhuller, though, the company has acquired such outstandingly smart dancers, and such a grown-up, versatile repertory that it won't need reinventing for a long time to come.
Jeremy Nelson's The Fact That It Goes Up launches the programme with a blast of urban energy. It is set to a soundscape of treated street noise, performed against a backdrop that looks like a machine design. The dancers often appear to be moving around a grid. But this is far from a study in dehumanised angst. Nelson inserts lustrous details into his lean, angular moves, which make his dancers flare, shiver and stretch. The work as a whole is too long, but the choreography is an upbeat study of humans elegantly adapted to their city environment.
Fin Walker's superb duet, Me & You, set to the glowing choral music of Ben Parker, inhabits an interior world. It moves with the rhythms of a boxing match, its short ferocious bouts of dance punctuated by dazed seconds of stillness. Yet the two men seem to be grappling with each other's souls rather than their bodies, and a lovely paradoxical intimacy emerges as their partnering becomes less manic. The further they move apart, the more clearly they see each other.
Walker's talent is her intensity of focus. Every detail in this duet, down to the wariest turn of the head, is choreographed. The problem with Bhuller's Requiem, which closes the programme, is that too much of its detail is illegible. This ambitious study of a child abduction and its traumatic aftermath draws on a range of storytelling devices: film footage of the mall where the girl disappears and of the fields that the community trawl for clues; a plangently expressive score by Jocelyn Pook; an ingeniously mobile set by Jamie Vartan. But though the excellent dancers tread a fine line between normality and anguish, and Bhuller imagines some starkly telling moments (the inarticulate father locked in a physical prison of grief), the elements don't combine to form a narrative. Bhuller wants too much action at once. Telling moments of crisis and disclosure are blurred, and the narrative rhythm is perversely disrupted. So far it is as a director, rather than a choreographer, that Bhuller triumphs in the new-look Phoenix.
· At Gardner Arts Centre, Brighton (01273 685861), tonight, then touring.
