Most of the publicity surrounding Bill T Jones centres on his politics, but the opening show of his company's UK tour is nearly all about dancing. It is also about history, and it begins with Arnie Zane's 1987 quartet The Gift/No God Logic, a beautiful, mysterious little piece that reminds us exactly what Jones lost when Zane died the following year.
On the surface The Gift seems like a slick exercise in minimalism. Its black-costumed dancers move in tight modulations that look briskly at odds with the intemperate passion of their music (extracts from Verdi's La Forza del Destino). But the emotion that's caught in the work is very far from a modish construct. The four dancers move with graceful inflections of hope and tenderness - a shy half point, a yielding plie - and begin to snatch fiercely ingenious embraces from within the rigorous logic of the choreography. Even when that logic forces the dancers apart they meet above it, flying into high, transcendent lifts. The Gift turns out to be a story of love and loss, all the more moving for being enacted with such an elegant, inexorable structure.
If Zane was the structure freak of the duo, Jones was the body sculptor. The two women performing his Duet (1995) are a riveting contrast of plush curves and sharp androgyny but as Jones's choreography torques their bodies through a dynamic play of imagery they look even more extraordinary. It is easy to imagine them as a pair of ancient deities worshipped by the Madagascan tribes whose folk music accompanies the piece.
Jones's talent for making the body resonate in space doesn't work so well on the large scale, though. In the urban warrior frenzy of D-Man in the Waters (1988/98) his eight dancers never climax into the collective rush we're expecting, while the five couples in Mercy 10x8 on a Circle don't gel into a fully coherent dance. This latter piece is, however, an abstracted version of another work, inspired by Flannery O'Connor's story, The Artificial Nigger. When that fully narrated work is shown in later programmes we may well read Mercy 10x8 very differently.
· At Lyceum, Sheffield (0114-249 6000), on June 11 and at Sadler's Wells, London EC2 (0870 737 7737), from June 15.
