Clad in black corsets, stockings and suspenders, they sashay and goose-step in four-and-a-half-inch heels. And that's not just the women. Lea Anderson's latest venture, 3, veers from the louche decadence of Weimar Republic cabarets to the undead of Michael Jackson's Thriller, via nightmarish playtime with traumatised children, like something from a Romanian orphanage.
In contrast to the minute fragments pieced together in her last work, Smithereens, Anderson has created a triple bill of 20-minute pieces for the all-male "Fans" and female "Chums". Inspired by photographs of children, In the Realms of the Unreal features the 10 dancers as grotesque youngsters in Victorian smocks, faces clagged with paint, mouths forming scarlet O-shapes in silent screams. They rock, tiptoe and hug themselves in this surreal junior bedlam.
Bouts of what seems like happy play, peeling off and bunching together, give way to disturbing skipping, muttering and whirling with manically swinging arms. Lit in green and violet by Simon Corder, with long fluorescent tubes dangling like stalactites, they lie on the stage then rise up writhing, as if poisoned.
It works on different levels. We have endearing childlike behaviour mixed with a Grand Guignol maelstrom of horror. These caricatures are overgrown, highly disturbed and fascinating. The whole thing is perfectly timed and controlled, the dancers using every muscle in fusillades of repetitive gestures. Hands shoot to mouths aghast, and while Anna Pons Carrera stiffly parades solo to martial music her playmates line up against the Perspex backdrop, faces contorted as if freshly hanged.
Anderson and dancers focus on an erotic collage to create The Black Rose Mandala, with its top-hatted and stiletto-tripping cabaret stars slicing and high stepping over elastic tapes pulled across the stage. In a kaleidoscope of permutations, legs splay out like wings on corkscrews, or interlock in multi-limbed tableaux like Indian gods.
The lines of dancers bend, moving crab-like, or weave their arms between their legs, bottoms up, creating an exotic cat's cradle with the tapes. Finally, Limbo looks at death straight from the Hammer horror genre, with juddering, gibbering zombies sporting sardonic grins. Gestures are hugely exaggerated with spiky, spooky arms, the ghouls wielding the pendant tubes like light sabres.
Anderson's work often seems to teeter between barking madness and genius, and 3 is another creative brainstorm with indelible images and seemingly wacky, but tightly disciplined dance.
· At Taliesin Arts Centre, Swansea, on Thursday. Box office: 01792 296883. Then tours to Wellingborough, Poole, Hereford, Leicester, Salford, Stockton on Tees and Swindon.
