Dancers like Jeremy James, who turn choreographer mid-career, sometimes never get further than duplicating their personal style on a large scale, the steps they make for others creating clones of themselves. James, though, is a dance maker with a passion for structure. His point of view is not his own body but the stage picture as a whole. So the pleasure of his latest programme, Floppy Affordable, is more than watching its five strikingly individual performers; it is scrutinising the internal mechanisms that activate the choreography, the cogs and wheels of motion which lock the dancers together in such cunningly contrived ways.
The first two works, The Day I Stopped and Parts, are set to music by Matteo Fargion whose style perfectly mirrors James's own: short energetic modules of invention which either terminate abruptly, or link in increasingly complex forms. James's choreography is a mix of nervy gesture and bold linear action, so that a phrase may originate with a sharp toss of the head; gather momentum as an arm or leg swings into space and then complicate into a sculptural torque of the body.
James also builds an impressive scale through cross currents of movement, giving a phrase to one dancer, then to two, and finally splintering it apart as different bodies elaborate variations on its theme. At moments of climax the stage hums like an elegant pinball machine with sparks and currents of energy zigzagging between the five bodies.
This is most beautifully achieved in Parts, which shares the stage with an extraordinary piece of film and video art by Steve Jackman and Hugo Glendenning. Projected onto the back of the stage are close-up images of paint - stripes, whorls and clumps of colour which flicker like an aura around the moving dancers. Towards the end these images become digitalised and hugely magnified so that we seem to see atoms of pure pigment pulsating and dissolving on the screen: the intricate world of the choreography mirrored in what looks like the secret life of paint.
The final work, Cheese, is set to a much hazier piece of music, trancelike and techno, and the dance itself has a looser, more whimsical feel. There are moments of eccentric humour and sensuous release, but the theatrical effect is far less exhilarating - verging more towards club than stage.
• Jeremy James & Company are at Castle Arts, Wellingborough (01933-270007) tonight and touring through March; also Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House, April 8 and 9.
