Northern highlights

So what has Denmark ever given the world? Great choreography for a start

Out of Denmark
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1

Random Dance Company
The Place, London WC1

Denmark vies with Russia as proud possessor of the oldest ballets still in performance. Now that Russian companies travel so much, their Petipa ballets and gala bits and pieces are widespread. The Danes, however, display the family jewels more selectively. To see the range of their Bournonville repertoire, you have to wait for a special festival. The next celebration of the Royal Danish Ballet's great nineteenth-century choreographer, August Bournonville, will be in Copenhagen in two years' time.

The 1992 festival was the occasion of young Johan Kobborg's rise to prominence. At the age of 19, he was stepping into sacred solo roles, an inheritance he left behind four years ago to join the Royal Ballet in London. Aware that we've lost touch with the Danish connection, he mounted his own programme during the summer break, danced by Royal Ballet colleagues.

Out of Denmark spanned 160 years of Danish choreography, from Bournonville to Kim Brandstrup, who created a pas de deux for the programme. The evening was split into three parts, starting with duets old and new, and ending with dances from Bournonville's Napoli. In between came Flemming Flindt's 1963 dance-drama, The Lesson, based on Eugene Ionesco's play of the same name.

The show opened with Harald Lander's Festpolonaise pas de deux, created in 1942. Kobborg reproduced it from a 1962 television recording, which accounts for the terrible quality of the soundtrack. A pity, because he and his Royal Ballet partner, Alina Cojocaru, danced it with aplomb, capturing the allure of the Danish style, with its humour, elegance and intimacy.

Lander followed Bournonville's example in basing his bravura choreography on folk-dance motifs. Royal Ballet dancers weren't up to speed in the Tyrolean and tarantella intricacies of their excerpts later in the programme, sunny though these were. The Jockey Dance, however, for two Frankie Dettori rivals, went with a swish. Dating back to 1876, it combines an English reel with a horse race - Bournonville's comic tribute to Britain.

Flindt's sinister masterpiece, The Lesson, had the ideal cast: Cojocaru as the edible ingénue coming for her private lesson with Kobborg's creepy teacher, and Zenaida Yanowsky as the pianist who has seen it all before. The power struggle seems to be between the girl and her uptight tutor, quivering with sexual tension. Then, as he turns in self-disgust from her limp body, you realise he is in thrall to the pianist, the mother figure who clears up the mess, again.

Yanowsky generated a surge of sympathy in Brandstrup's new Afsked pas de deux, with Dylan Elmore as her partner. The painful parting focuses on the woman's feelings, longing for the support she knows she must reject. Brandstrup shows how revealing dance can be. His pas de deux has no more need of words than Schubert's Winterreise needs choreography; we understand without the meaning being expounded.

Brandstrup is unusual as a contemporary dance-maker in wanting to explore profound emotions. Although he hasn't always taken the audience with him in longer works, Afsked (Danish for departure) is a triumph.

So why is modern dance often reduced to abstract semaphore, set to alienating soundscores? The question will arise throughout Dance Umbrella, which opens next Sunday. Random Dance has slipped in ahead, with a season that continues this week at the Place. Wayne McGregor has marked its tenth anniversary by introducing work from choreographers other than himself for the first time.

The result is a dilution of the company's cyborg image. It's still there in McGregor's new piece, which continues his vein of super-supple dance with its own peculiar logic. In contrast, Shobana Jeyasingh's splintered sequences appear arbitrary, set to yet another nerve-racking racket. Though she mixes martial arts, Indian gestures and acrobatic partnering, the outcome still looks like generic McGregor. She is trying to be edgy instead of providing a contrasting style for the company.

They have some light relief in Rui Horta's concoction. Matthias Sperling prepares a Thai curry onstage while three dancers roll and sputter in a wok-shaped circle. Sperling is challenged to chop and stir-fry in time (and to recite his recipe while performing), but Horta runs out of ideas for the others all too soon.

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