Union Dance Company are a funding body's dream. Not only have they sustained a quiet but committed mixed-race hiring policy for the past 14 years, but they've learned a special astuteness in tapping into the all-elusive, all-desirable youth audience. Last year's show, themed around the PlayStation game Tekken, brought in a huge and noisy teenage crowd. And this year's programme, with visuals sponsored by PlayStation UK, is bringing them back again.
It's important, though, that the company don't play down to their public. Their opening work was commissioned from Laurie Booth, whose meditative choreographic structures might be considered too slow for kids used to the neuron fireworks induced by computer games. At 40 minutes Generic Signatures is in fact too long by half, for both young and adult audiences. But it is still a serious and beautiful piece of choreography, which elevates its viewers into a state of trancelike responsiveness.
Booth takes his base vocabulary from the Brazilian martial art capoeira, and around its spinning kicks and powered lunges he improvises heart-stopping sculptural stillnesses and flickering currents of dance that bind its five performers into a graceful perpetuum mobile. The dance is vividly lit and Philip Jeck, long-time maestro of the scratch-and-mix school of music, produces a hypnotic stream of sound on stage from his turntables and mixing board.
The dancers look good too, their performances both bold and entranced, and I guess they must have spent a while with Booth, tuning into the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of his style. Unfortunately, they appear to have spent little more than a fortnight with Doug Elkins, choreographer of the second work, Starlings Scatter.
Elkins has made work for Union before and his zappy fusion of hip hop, ballet and martial arts has previously given the dancers excitement and juice. But in this piece his familiar repertory of moves is lazily re-hashed, with little evidence of expansion or embellishment. The design and sound present a far more interesting concept. PlayStation graphics of digital landscapes are mixed with film footage of sublime cloudscapes and flocking birds, and this hi-tech pastoral is paralleled by the electronic treatment of a Monteverdi score which generates a kind of MTV baroque. Its a pity that equal care hadn't gone into the movement, but the audience loyally loved it anyway.
