Anyone coming new to Mark Morris's work may struggle during parts of his second programme to get a handle on what kind of choreographer he really is. This is an evening where the mood ranges from beguiling comedy to extreme, austere formalism, and whose four works occupy very different stylistic worlds. The programme opens with a full-wattage dose of Morris's charm as he and two other dancers frolic through the bar room comedy From Old Seville. This little vignette starts out as a straightforwardly louche tale of drink and seduction but is rapidly subverted by two typical Morris jokes. The first is that he and his girl don't end up in a predictable disco grapple but in a full-blown flamenco duet. The second is that Morris gets to perform both the guy's steps and the girl's, flaring his nostrils and stamping like a Gypsy king. At the same time he works his castanets and his arms with the grace of a Gypsy diva. The result is mesmerising and very funny.
From here, the evening changes gear abruptly to the eccentric musical world of Henry Cowell and a dance of curiously understated fragments. The choreography of Mosaic and United is beautiful - a faintly exotic design of slanted poses and lilting folk steps. Yet, combined with the quiet idiosyncrasies of Cowell's music, its cumulative effect is to glint rather than dazzle, and it requires its audience to go a long way to meet it. And when it comes to Candleflower, Morris's brand new setting of Stravinsky's Serenade in A, some viewers may not even find a route in.
The design of this piece is seductively romantic, with a pattern of flickering candles framing the stage, yet the choreography is the complete opposite, obsessively focused on a plain white square and assembled out of a language of hard, flat lines. It is almost as if, in order to grasp the structure of his score, Morris has reduced his language to a harsh algebra of rhythm and shape.
It is only in the last work V, set to Schumann's Piano Quintet Op 44, that we get to see him gleefully bringing back the colour. As 16 dancers cross the stage in waves of full-bodied movement they radiate all the physical exuberance and emotional juice that audiences have always looked for and loved in Morris's work. But it is in the stark second movement that V's heart beats the loudest. Here the dancers are forced down on all fours as they stalk the dark questing logic of the music. It's an astonishing image. And only a choreographer capable of the restraint of Candleflower could have imagined it.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 0870 737 7737. Then touring.
