Electronic dancing images are all the rage among choreographers at the moment - and it's no longer a surprise to see computer-generated performers striding around among live men and women on stage. But while the virtual bodies introduced by Merce Cunningham and Wayne McGregor seem to be visiting from some alien planet or future epoch, the pixilated dancer in Shobana Jeyasingh's new piece Phantasmaton comes from the classical past.
Projected in black and white on to a geometric patchwork of screens, she is a traditional bharata natyam soloist in full make-up and Indian dress - and her flickering, wide-eyed presence haunts the stage upon which her 21st-century descendants experiment with variants on her ancient temple dancing. She signals that Phantasmaton will be a continuation of Jeyasingh's personal synthesis of old and new, east and west. She is also one reason the work is one of the choreographer's most ambitious and beautiful to date.
Jeyasingh has said that this piece is about the way we create our identities within "the dark gaps and broken edges of city life today". But audiences don't need to be told that as they watch her six dancers negotiate dazzling, nervy paths through her choreography. The story of how they piece themselves together is partly told through the range of Jeyasingh's current vocabulary. Her distinctive Anglo-Asian style has been extended in all directions with slick, knowing jazz inflections and the curvy spaciousness of ballet - and the dancers look both culturally displaced and globally confident as they fuse these idioms.
Jocelyn Pook's supple score (traditional South Asian singing layered with western postminimalism) adds to the mix, as do Ursula Bombshell's sexually ambivalent costumes. But even more important is the way Jeyasingh keeps the choreography poised between order and disequilibrium. Her dancers seem to rethink every step halfway through: they slither out of duets or group dances before they are complete, their collective energy is in a constant state of flux. Yet what makes this mesmerising rather than distracting is the superb certainty of Jeyasingh's invention and the skill of her dancers. Never before has she had such a good-looking company (the addition of virtuoso Mavin Khoo has a transforming effect).
Their combined talents also flatter the reworked Surface Tension, which accompanies Phantasmaton. This is another glittery display of dancing-on-the-edge, and in this too Jeyasingh finds a secure beauty as she contemplates the breakdown of the old choreographic order.
At Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham (0115-846 7777), on Thursday, then tours.
