After nearly two years away from the dance scene Phoenix has risen again in its most impressive form yet. Like the company's new logo - tongues of flame and shooting sparks - the action is hot and full of physical pyrotechnics, with a crackling energy and confident assurance that bodes well.
Artistic director Darshan Singh Bhuller has chosen highly individual dancers for the spring tour and the triple bill from prize-winning Fin Walker, Jeremy Nelson and Bhuller was an impressive showcase for their talents.
Bhuller's Requiem was another of his piercing pieces of social observation. A child goes missing from a shopping mall and a family is torn apart, but the parents are finally united in their grief. This is a narrative work screaming out his physical style with punishing, aggressive duets and snatches of humour - and football - to relieve the bleakness. Jamie Vartan's shop-front set doubles as a cinema with projections of shopping-mall activity.
Guest artist David Hughes and Finnish dancer Tiia Ourila are electric as the parents, bodies locked in violent battle while a happy-family video runs behind them. Hughes is powerful and terrifying, using his fists to slug away his pain. In a repeated motif Bhuller has dancers climbing the walls in despair: scaling up, body on body, or clinging vertically like limpets. Jocelyn Pook's haunting vocal Requiem heightens the emotion as the set revolves to reveal a bank of flickering candles for the lost child.
With its amazing soundscape of New York, Nelson's The Fact That It Goes Up was a strong opener. It was a seamless thread of action, the dancers cogs in the urban machine, moving loose and fluid or martially precise.
In contrast, Errol White and Brazilian Yann Seabra fought a strobe-fast duel for every sinew in Walker's breathtaking bodily clash, Me and You. The Phoenix has risen, strong and focused.
· At the Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield (01484 430 528), February 26. Then touring.
