Some of the world's most distinctive dances started out as hybrids, bred from the slow mixing and migration of cultures. Flamenco was born from a merging of Indian and Spanish styles, by way of north Africa; tap started as a dialogue between Irish and African immigrants in America. But times, and travel, have speeded up and the point of Covent Garden's New:Currents season is to give a snapshot of the international flux driving today's dance scene.
Typical is Liz Lea, an Australian who came to London after working as a showgirl in Japan and forged her style out of south Asian and western modern dance. In her solo Inland these influences are astutely blended to dramatise a kind of private mythology. Lea portrays the landscape of her emotions by shape-changing through animal, spirit and human forms. The concept of the work, as well as its flickering mime and facial expressions, is eastern, but Lea moves with a broad, supple and very western energy that prevents it looking touristy or twee.
Lea sees her own journey foreshadowed in the career of Ruth St Denis, a vaudeville dancer who ransacked eastern mythology to develop her own novelty exotic act. Though Lea admits she is treading a fine line between "the historical and the hysterical" in re-creating St Denis's 1906 piece Radha, you have to admire the guts with which she braves its hokey high seriousness. The results are credible enough to be informative, but the production as a whole lacks charisma. Lea could do with a little incense on stage and a far more convincing chorus of acolytes.
St Denis was blithely unhampered by political correctness when she used the east as a giant dressing-up box, but Roger Sinha's Dhiva attempts to capture the conflict and trauma that can arise from cultural collision. This solo has Lea veering wildly between ballerina and classical Indian dancer, muddling her mime with her mudras and dancing bharata natyam to Rossini. There is a kind of traumatised energy driving the piece, but much of its emotion looks spurious and unfocused. Who is this Dhiva, and why is she in a panic? The piece seems to have no clue.
· The New:Currents season continues until July 24. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
