Dance's most charismatic soloists have historically been women - Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Loie Fuller - but the rush on tickets for Monday night's First Class Air Male suggests that single men are in vogue.
Of the four male soloists on show, Akram Khan is the only one performing his own choreography, his acclaimed piece Loose in Flight. Here Khan works within the modular phrases of his native Kathak style and blows them open with the blunter, wilder moves of modern dance. In concentrated riffs he moves from radiant stillness to ferocious bursts of speed, changing drastic gear from tiny classical detail to raging, ragged leaps. The beauty of his dancing, the absoluteness of his control hold the theatre breathless.
Adam Cooper is Khan's equal at dominating the stage, simply by virtue of his personal glamour. But in Jan De Schynkel's Can't Bark he reminds us of the dangerous intensity of his imagination. In this funny, disturbing study of conflicting desire Cooper is half man, half dog, an angry, rude, comic, disgusting beast. He clutches on to his own lead, rubs at his outrageously phallic tail, dances himself frantic and glowers passionately at the audience. It is a wonderfully bizarre piece.
Wayne McGregor's Codex is performed by the excellent Ben Ash, whose square, terrier body gives an intriguing physical slant to the long, flickering lines of McGregor's choreography, hardening its limbs, and building solid texture through its sudden kinks and changes of pace. Ash, like the other two, is a virtuoso in his own style - which leaves the last of the four, Frédéric Seguette, looking a little like a wallflower.
The wit of Jérme Bel's Shirtologie emerges too slowly and too intermittently as Seguette simply stands centre stage and peels off a series of T-shirts, each one emblazoned with the logos of 21st-century capitalism. Seguette does, however, have an enchanting way of looking crushed and bemused by the weight of information he's carrying on his chest, and his mournful humour adds to a showcase for male performance and choreography that deserves much wider showing.
