For their latest project, Michael Nunn and William Trevitt have been grooming eight young men to succeed them as second generation Balletboyz. The group's average age is just 21, and several of the dancers have never performed professionally – but now is the time to see them. Still raw, with their spikiness and vulnerabilities visible, part of their impact comes from the fact that you can sense the journey they have travelled to be on stage together, and to be dancing so enthrallingly well.
Unblushingly titled The Talent, the programme for their company debut is clever, if uneven. Freddie Opoku Addaie's B-Banned plugs into the competitive dynamic of the group, with a story line (segueing from some joshing rehearsal video) of the eight dancers fighting over who gets to be the front man, the lead Talent. The choreography divides them into characters, preening Davin King, cocky Corey Baker, moody Kai Downham, and has fun showing off their individual skills (moonwalks and backflips) and mannerisms.
More interestingly, it tries to twist the material into stranger terrain. Opoku Addaie has a gift for destabilising rhythms and morphing steps so that they become disturbing, not quite human, and it's disappointing that he doesn't push this further. Instead, the work fidgets around with scraps of dialogue, with Matt Rees doing a stunt on a bass guitar; the final effect is fitful and unresolved.
The choreography in Paul Roberts's Alpha is, by contrast, highly finessed. This is another ensemble piece and it plays to the dancers' acrobatic expertise, massing them into clusters that seem to stretch and fly around the stage of their own collective volition; it also separates into short duets, whose lifts and balances hold the dancers in moments of piercing contact. It's a shame the work doesn't come with better designs – the men's hooded costumes are an absurd distraction – or stronger music. Keaton Henson sounds like a whispery, schoolboy version of Neil Young; his songs give the choreography nothing to fight against.
Closing the programme on a high is Russell Maliphant's Torsion, originally choreographed as a duet for Nunn and Trevitt, reinvented here for six dancers. The change in scale inevitably lessens the work's intimacy, but it's replaced by an exhilarating buildup of power: a precariously cantilevered lift now multiplied by three, a scatter of rolling bodies, a zigzagging of lunges. It retains the extraordinary central image of a dancer (King) spinning a wide, slow circle on his knees as if unwinding the work's energy on a thread. Torsion makes serious demands on its cast – and the new Balletboyz meet them like grownups.
