This season Christopher Bruce retires as Rambert's artistic director. While he has been in the post only eight years, the company has been family to him since 1963. With it Bruce emerged as one of his generation's leading dancers and choreographers, and it is through Rambert that his reputation will continue.
His farewell programme, deliberately low key, is less a personal history than a show of his director's vision, his eclectic commissioning style. Rightly, Bruce's choreography is the centrepiece, with a repeat of Grinning in Your Face, the dance portrait of the US midwest he created last year to the music of blues guitarist Martin Simpson.
Some of this overuses Bruce's trademark moves (folksy line dances and suffering asides), but there is a closely observed detail and empathy that reveals unexpectedly luminous moments within its characters' worlds.
The work's humanity dovetails with the evening's other revival, Siobhan Davies' Sounding (1989). On the surface this is an abstract dialogue with the large and strange resonances of Giacinto Scelsi's percussive score. Yet, as its six dancers are swept into lyric currents of unison or linked into intent duets, they seem intriguingly to press against invisible barriers dividing them from each other and the surrounding space.
It would be a shame to rain on Bruce's farewell show by dwelling on the first of its two London premieres, Study from Blackbird. Not only do the self-conscious twitterings and faux oriental moves in Jiri Kylian's choreography revel in all the perverse obscurantism you would expect, but they could not present more of glum contrast to the pleasures of Wayne McGregor's latest work, PreSentient.
This is a blast, not least because of the thrilling sound of its accompanying score, played live by three string quartets. McGregor's choreography scales the heights of Steive Reich's Triple Quartet with his usual ferociously pitched invention, the 12 dancers scattering and regrouping with an energy that makes them look twice their number. But the choreography also flares into hot little duets of intimacy and need that take the work way beyond a brilliant exercise in stamina.
As for the dancers, their performances represent the biggest tribute to Bruce's direction. It would be hard to find another company so technically expert, so avidly committed and so questingly versatile. These are Bruce's team: even as he leaves them, they look ready for anything.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 020-7863 8000
