DANCE / A foreign dream of liberation: Judith Mackrell on a 'Turning World' double bill at the Place Theatre

THIS YEAR the Place Theatre has trawled five different countries to present its 'Turning World' season of new dance. Japanese, Tunisian and Argentinian choreography have all been added to the more familiar European imports to provide an ambitiously global perspective on the dance scene.

In Tuesday's double bill, though, it was a piece from Europe that spoke with one of the most startling foreign voices. While the Canadian choreographer Lynda Gaudreau produced a predictable study of fashionable, truculent anxiety, the solo How I Caught a Falcon by the Slovenian dancer / choreographer Iztok Kovac was like nothing you'd seen before.

New dance is one of the last things anyone connects with Slovenia right now, and Kovac commands an instant regard by simply coming from where he does. His country's current traumas also give him a peculiar right to his theme - a dream of liberation and transcendence. Yet what's compelling about his work, both its strengths and its flaws, is the sense that Kovac is constructing a very personal language out of the larger exigencies of his geographical situation.

Kovac is a bolt of energy; he moves hard and fast but also composes his limbs into unusually sharp lines and phrases his movement in piercingly precise rhythms. He begins and ends the piece with a stunning image of himself as the Falcon, standing in a pool of white light, with his arms wheeling so fast around his head that they blur into radiant arcs. It's a vision of a man transcending his limitations, and the main body of the piece is about Kovac improvising a series of dance and performance strategies by which he can have and hold that kind of escape.

He tries out various dance passages to sections of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony - sometimes moving with graceful meditativeness, sometimes plummeting around the stage. There are moments where the combination of dance and music, the alternation of ecstasy and calm, are intoxicating, yet they remain only short- lived. He also tries shifting his role from dancer to gymnast and conjuror, attempting a few acrobatic stunts to elevate himself to a magical sphere. His routines are deft but not brilliant. Kovac shrugs, chats a little to the audience, throws a few comments to his sound engineers then recovers his energies and starts something new.

Towards the close of his solo, he begins dancing to blasts of heavy rock. These rev his movement into something much angrier and more destructive as the mercurial dancer-magician turns militant. The suddenness of this transition is typical of the abruptness with which Kovac flips through all his material. In fact, the piece lurches so unsettlingly from one device to the next that it becomes gappy, hard to get hold of. The ending, when Kovac suddenly recovers that moment of Falcon freedom, is so unexpected that it almost pre-empts its own emotional power.

Yet this improvised, uneasy quality is central to the work's power. By presenting himself so nakedly as a performer inventing his own rules, Kovac brings a rawness to the emotions at work in the piece. He also, quietly, touches on the drama of a whole people struggling with their destiny.

The Place, London WC1 (071-387 0031).