Certain performing modes suit CandoCo's mix of able-bodied and disabled dancers particularly well: haughtiness, anger, sex, mystery, power. All these emotions fall well outside the soggy image that dogged the company's early years, butin CandoCo's latest programme there is little caring and sharing on view. The three choreographers who have collaborated with the group simply take the performers (who include two wheelchair-users and a dancer with an amputated leg) as a source of inspiration.
Shadow, by Fin Walker, is the most complex work on the programme. Walker's style is a fierce articulation of physical and emotional demand. When her dancers perform alone they crowd the air with a stabbing urgency; in duets or trios, they invade each other's body space without apology.
The choreography's finely calibrated recklessness is distributed equally among the company. Welly O'Brien is a star performer: at times she is flung by the more mobile dancers; at others she turns, dips, falls on her own momentum with exquisite abandon. And when wheelchair-user David Lock rakes the audience with a dark, furious gaze, it is haunting and intimidating.
There is an equal charge of pride and power in Javier de Frutos's Sour Cream. Three women in magnificent evening dresses are seated like empresses on the floor; the only mobile dancer is Pedro Machado, who flickers around them like some captive jester or priest. The soundtrack of Chinese drumming, combined with the imperious moves of the women's upper bodies and the ravishing colours of Michael Mannion's lighting, evokes the atmosphere of an ancient court. The relative immobility of the three fabulous women conjures images of bound feet and high prestige. This is an astonishing, unique piece.
By contrast, Jamie Watton's Phasing feels less passionately imagined. Lock gets to do little more than echo the gestures of other dancers; the mild choreography ebbs and flows, but this feels more like the beginnings of an idea than a fully realised piece. It is a mixed evening but, by any standards, a good one.
· At the Lighthouse, Poole (01202 665334), March 14 and 15, and Wyvern Theatre, Swindon (01793 524481), April 2.
