Sankai Juku must have performed in London four or five times during the past decade. Watching their latest show, Hibiki, many of the elements that make up their unique performance ritual seem very familiar. The elemental minimalism of their stage design is, as always, exquisitely achieved. The dancers' minutely calibrated movements make them seem, as always, like priests in some painfully elevated trance. Time passes slowly, the seconds marked in this show by the drip, drip of water into huge glass dishes.
In Hibiki, Sankai Juku are as perfect as they always are within the formula they have set themselves. So is there any sense in considering whether this new show is any better or worse than the others? Or even if it's any different?
The curtain rises on a stage circled with 12 pools of water and with five dancers lying in foetal position in circles of golden light. One man, Ushio Amagatsu, stands erect, dancing like a statue in a zen garden come to life. Then the others rise to perform introvert, repetitive passages of dance. Their hands are clawed, their knees sag, their faces are sternly immobile. The music ranges from harshly amplified strings to lyric piano and churning industrial noise.
There are two dramatic changes of gear in the show. One occurs when four dancers appear in corsets and skirts, swarming round one of the pools of water, which has been bloodied with red paint. The men's shaven heads, pallid rice-powdered skins, and narcissistic gestures make them appear like 19th-century courtesans returned from some transsexual limbo. The other climax is a breathtaking light change in which the stage is pooled with gold and aquamarine, and patterned with an extravagant chiaroscuro effect. The dancers, gilded against the deep black of the backdrop, look like gods from another planet.
Little else in the show, however, worked any of the predictable Sankai Juku magic on me. I found its repetitions dull rather than focused and I resisted its efforts to nudge me into any contemplation of body, time or spirit. This surliness on my part may have been the fault of the choreography, which possibly had a more limited stock of images than usual, or of the stage design, which, though beautiful, may have been more static. Or it could simply have been that I was so sick of the unrelenting drip of rain outside, that I had no patience for the unchanging theatrical weather inside. Sankai Juku dramatically displace our normal readings of body language and create bizarre, wonderful images, but they expect their audience to fill in an awful lot of the spaces between. And if you're not in the mood, those spaces can seem like so much metaphysical hot air.
• Until Saturday. Box office: 020-7863 8000.
