Pina Bausch's most recent works have been classified as a string of travelogues - shows inspired by places (Hong Kong, California, and Palermo) where she has spent time working and thinking.
Yet if Masurca Fogo (Fiery Mazurka) can be linked to Portugal and its historic axis with Brazil, it is also very much a location imagined within the geography of Bausch's internal map.
Travelling South has unquestionably lightened the Teutonic world gloom for which Bausch has been notorious, for Masurca Fogo is an exuberant comic fantasy and tropical holiday rolled into one.
Film sequences, projected over the whole stage, route the dancers on an exotic journey through a steamy Brazilian landscape, taking in a rainforest, a dusty square, and the sea shore - conjured out of huge rock breasting the back of the stage, and ecstatic, extraordinary images of water which make the dancers appear as if they are frolicking in the waves.
Bausch's sharp mudlarker's eye for social ritual and collective loopiness snags most eagerly on the possibilities of seaside jinks. The dancers parade and scrutinise each other's bodies, scoot like kids along an improvised water slide, and cram into a beach hut for a party. Here and everywhere else they dance a great deal of fierce dense choreography (set to a musical collage that ranges from hot and drowsy Latin rhythms to kd lang).
As the show progresses you realise that the Wuppertal men and women have never looked so physically happy in their skins. They line up as usual for Bausch's trademark sexual confrontations and skirmishes, they step forward eagerly to confess their secrets.
Yet over and over again their unease diffuses into hilarity, their fears turn into flirtation, and their cruelty is directed into carnival mayhem.
It is not that the cast do not let us into their strangest and most intimate fantasies, it is just that for once we see them more as beguiling friends and entertainers rather than sufferers.
Certainly, in the beatific finale - where the whole cast curl up to sleep in the midst of gigantic blossoms, opening and closing like sea anemones - it feels like a kind of benediction, like Bausch making her peace with the world.
· Until Sunday. Box office: 020-7863 8000.
