Founded in 2000, From Here to Maturity is one of London's youngest dance companies. Its seven members, however, have a certain seniority. The youngest, dancer and choreographer Matthew Hawkins, is 45. The oldest, Jane Dore, is 74.
The ensemble was formed by Ann Dickie, 58, to challenge preconceived notions about the role of the older dancer. Several European choreographers - Pina Bausch, Régine Chopinot, Jiri Kylian - have made work for older performers, but in Britain the best that the fortysomething-plus dancer can hope for is a succession of semi-static character roles in story-ballets.
The FHTM team have other ideas. For their fourth show, ex-Rambert dancer Dickie has commissioned a double bill, both halves of which examine the theme of time. Matthew Hawkins's Raft of Reasons is danced by himself and 50-year-old former Royal Ballet dancer Jennifer Jackson. The piano music (Satie, Liszt and Debussy) is wintry. The designs see the pair in black velvet, feathers and jewelled chiffon, like haute-couture vampires. A long stillness, and then a montage of fugitive gestures, crouching animal walks and ritualistic ballet steps unfolds. It is as if the dancers have awoken from aeons of sleep (or have travelled Bram Stoker's "oceans of time") and random fragments of physical memory are manifesting themselves. The result is strangely moving.
Luca Silvestrini's I Close My Eyes is an absurdist piece to a soundtrack uniting, among others, Roy Orbison and Ennio Morricone. The set takes the form of a large bed, on which the five-strong cast variously shriek with laughter, scream with frustration, fight, argue, make love and die. These are lives measured out in bedsheets.
Ex-Rambert dancer Lucy Burge's voluptuous, sex-hungry housewife is nicely matched by Tom Yang's clownish lover. And the sight of Yang surfing round the stage on a bath towel while singing I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside has to be one of the year's defining dance images.
· At Nuffield Theatre, University of Lancaster, tonight. Box office: 0800 028 3042. Then touring.
