There are moments in Oguike's collaboration with the Britten Sinfonia where it is music rather than choreography that dominates. Not only do the Sinfonia play on stage the entire time but they are clearly in the driving seat during the programme's centrepiece, Tippett's Concerto for Double String Orchestra.
It's hard to imagine that even Oguike, who is famously intrepid in his musical choices, would independently choose to choreograph this score. Tippett's sound is so lush, so serene, that dance can have little argument with it, and initially Oguike's armoury of gentle, bouncing, folksy steps not only look ineffectual but fake. Yet he starts to find his purchase on the music during the second movement, a solo during which Nuno Silver dreamily, secretly wraps the tendrils of Tippett's melody around himself.
And by the third movement, Oguike looks totally convincing as the musical and choreographic abundance that has been gathered up is scattered deliriously over the stage, the dancers linking into chains and the whole dynamic building to a gathering rush.
Confidently as the work concludes, it couldn't survive without the framing drama of the musicians on stage; however, the rest of the evening is completely taken over by Oguike, with a revival of his cataclysmic signature piece Front Line and a London premiere for Tiger Dancing, set to Steve Martland's score and inspired by Blake's The Tyger.
For this, his latest piece, Oguike resists all temptations towards the zoomorphic, but instead invents a language of savagely eclectic exoticism in which tiny geisha-style runs, high on the balls of the feet, are mixed with atavistic Greek poses, and pouncing leaps. The effect is scintillating. Oguike's eight dancers glitter like beasts, glimpsed through dark undergrowth, and as they track each other in virtuoso flickers of dance the stage hums with all the "fearful symmetry" of Blake's imagining.
· At Newcastle Dance City on May 25. Box office: 0191-261 0505.
