Early on in her career, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker choreographed steps that were powered by exhilarating, sometimes lacerating certainties. These days, although she employs dancers of considerable style and interest, she rarely bothers to advance much information about their bodies and their worlds. In terms of pure dance her works frequently fall back on sloppy self-derivative moves, and frequently fail to spark into anything like significant composition.
Yet when she works with other people's words, music and ideas De Keersmaeker still displays both vision and acumen. That accounts for how her 1999 piece I said I, a collaboration with Rosas, the dance company she set up in 1983, manages to be three parts chronic bore - but one part powerful theatre.
The piece is about the ways in which we acquire the social personalities that allow us to conform and rebel. Its text is based on Peter Handke's play Self- accusation, and the vividly cosmopolitan group that make up Rosas spend part of this long show batting around phrases that trace the process of regulation - from babyhood (naming objects, learning guilt) to the whole political, social and intellectual rulebook that defines being an adult. In places this builds into a funny and scary litany of the world's demands and prohibitions, in which the foundations of individuality start to look terrifyingly fragile. And De Keersmaeker choreographs an absorbing gloss on Handke's words with a series of neatly observed vignettes of conformity and deviancy: dancers crunch crisps and smoke during each other's solos, or wander offstage into the auditorium.
An ambitious range of live music, including jazz saxophone and string quartet, galvanises the dancers' moves as they play with the permutations of their group dynamic (ganging up, sloping off by themselves, hoping for tender cooperation). And at this point we can still admire the stringent, committed passion of their performances. But as the group escalate into a frenzied argument between aggression and dissent, the show loses the plot. Cut loose from the text, De Keersmaeker's dancers are left to ramble around the stage in fatuously repetitive choreography, or indulge in tantrums that would shame a two-year-old.
With no interval to punctuate the two and a half hours of relentlessly drawn-out material, the show starts to feels as stale and frustrating as an all-night wait for a delayed plane. At one point a group "reject" chants a rhetorical enquiry as to the nature of his fault, fatally including the question: "Did I violate the laws of theatre?" All the people who walked out long before the show was over answered that one with their feet.
Ends tomorrow. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
