For years Trisha Brown refused to allow music anywhere near her brainy, minimalist works. Now she not only choreographs to her pick of the world's great scores, but in this new staging of Winterreise she tries to get dance and music deep under each other's skins.
With baritone Simon Keenlyside performing alongside three of Brown's own dancers, the breath and muscle of his singing merge with the breath and muscle of the choreographed action.
During some sections the dancers are used, straightforwardly, to populate the world of Schubert's wanderer. As Keenlyside paces the stage their movements assume the shapes of the trees, birds, and sleeping villagers which the hero passes en route.
But much of the time Keenlyside is not just travelling through this animate world he is dancing in it, too. At the minimal least, he works a stylised vocabulary of austere gestural emotion but at impressive full stretch he allows himself to be lifted and flung by the three dancers as he sings of his grief, or to fall back into their cradling arms when he longs for rest.
And the marvel of Keenlyside is that while he's singing this marathon of a tensely modulated, vividly imagined Winterreise, his body never loses its poise.
Of course, his actions affect the quality of the singing, but this is part of the performance's drama. When the hero is dreaming, Keenlyside is lying on his back, balanced on the dancers' hands and feet, and his voice sounds as if it's physically floating into fantasy. When he falls forward to sing to the snow covered ground his voice, sent deep into his belly, has a harsh muscular anguish.
There are, inevitably, moments where Brown's choreography is a distraction, even an irrelevence. But in the two closing songs, music and staging create a joint intensity that scotches any doubts about the truth of this collaboration.
In the hallucinatory Mock Suns, Keenlyside hurtles to the piano and crouches beneath it, seeking refuge from his demons. And by the time he's begun The Organ Grinder he is standing in darkness, a man ousted forever from the real world.
These images explode out of the music with a shocking visual force, but the greatness of this Winterreise lies in the fact they don't shatter the score. They hold it and fix it in our memory.
· Further performance tomorrow (box office: 020-7638 8891); then the Theatre Royal, Newcastle on Saturday (box office: 0870 905 5060).
