It has always been Union's proud boast that they are a company with an eye for the street, and certainly they were among the first British troupes to raid the imagery of computer games, hip-hop and martial arts. But their latest double bill, Sensing Change, feels more chequebook than cutting edge, more about accessorising the stage with the trappings of popular culture than working it through the dancers' bodies and imaginations.
The stage for Mavin Khoo's Pure C has the desperately glossy look of an over-aspirational club. Shiny digital images play on screens in the background, while the seven live performers are showcased on an arrangement of platforms and dancefloors - locked, seemingly, into the pounding rant of the accompanying music, except when they slip off stage for one of their many costume changes.
Within this tightly subdivided space, it's not surprising that Khoo's choreography is all about the pose. Each segment of dance is a string of look-at-me moments, hyperextended legs, sharply torqued angles, swivelled hips, sullen pouts and exotically coiled arms. It's all meant to look a little bit decadent, a little bit alien, but in fact it is dispiritingly banal. Nothing is going on beneath the movement's surface flash, not even technique - for Khoo's greatest offence is giving these dancers material that is way beyond their skill.
Rafael Bonachela, a far more experienced choreographer, does at least give the company a more appropriate vocabulary. Silence Disrupted builds from a series of abrupt cameos to a rocking group number, and keeps the dancers moving in sensitive, edgy dialogue with each other. The design is more minimal: a flash of light painting, some blurred digital imagery that shifts subtly with the piece.
However, seeing the work straight after Pure C points up a strand of claustrophobic inwardness in Bonachela's piece - its peculiar reluctance to use and acknowledge the whole stage space. Perversely, for a programme that's meant to fast-forward into an exciting future, this double bill feels as if it is happening very late at night, among people who sense, listlessly, that the action has moved on elsewhere.
