Dance: Phoenix just keeps rising

"NO MORE ASHES," proclaims the flyer for the latest Phoenix tour. The trick of the mythical bird of course is that it can reinvent itself ad infinitum. And that's just what Britain's premier black dance company has done. Founded 16 years ago by a bunch of talented schoolboys in Leeds, Phoenix has expanded, disbanded, regrouped, made a feature of being all- black, then multi-racial, then back to all-black again. It's done highbrow, lowbrow, flirted with jazz dance and street dance, represented Britain at the opening of the Atlanta Olympics, and now it's got itself a smart new American director whose first show, somewhat optimistically given the company's brantub cv, is calling itself Essentially Phoenix.

Quite what this essence is remains unclear in the four new commissions the company showed at the South Bank last week. But to judge by the enthusiasm of Tuesday's matinee audience for a brawny New York clubbing number, that's where the fans' tastes lie. Costumes that would put skinny white dancers to fright set off the Phoenix physiques a treat, and there were murmurs of approval when the dancers for Dwight Rhoden's Diction appeared in skimpily cut scarlet velvet. Two well-muscled boys and two silky girls take turns to strut their stuff centre stage, striking competitive attitudes and body-conditioning poses before dashing off neat balletic spins and scissor jumps. Each pair then nips behind a microphone to provide a spoken soundtrack to the next pair's routine, a stream of overlapping text from the Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus school of gender studies. This is dance-as-sex as athletic-war-zone. And each gives as good as they get.

A debut piece of choreography by Phoenix member Stephen Derrick likewise revels in the body beautiful, this time encased in pastel stretch jeans, clambering over and around a shiny steel cube. But, though the moves are fluid and confident, they lack purpose, so that when the piece ends it suggests a drying-up of ideas, rather than resolution. Even less convincing is the contribution from director Thea Nerissa Barnes, using a recorded poetic text by Sol B River. A lone, boyish figure is bombarded with advice for clean living by Mom, Dad, a minister and a patois-gabbling grandma, as he doodles about the stage looking shiftless. The piece is salvaged by solo dancer Booker T Louis, whose out-and-out charm sweeps all else out of mind.

The best comes last with Mark Baldwin's Templates of Glory, a 20-minute Elysian romp set to Rameau. Elegant courtship dances erupt in joyful mimicry of butterflies and beasts; the men leap like panthers, the girls do an impression of the Three Graces. Modern dance has met baroque music in similar fashion elsewhere (in work by America's Mark Morris and Paul Taylor, and our own Richard Alston), but Baldwin takes the cheerful insouciance a stage further, culminating in a raspberry blown at the audience. Templates of Glory is a classical-modern gem, but for all its cheeky quirks, it's not a template that fits Phoenix. They're cut out for more rugged stuff.

Mark Murphy and his company, V-TOL, have never been in any doubt where they're heading. Murphy has been experimenting with layers of film and live dance for years, building on the idea of using multiple screens simultaneously to give different insights into the same scenario. His usual subject is sex - the wolfish characters in his bedsit narratives seem scarcely to exist for anything else. But his latest piece, And Nothing But the Truth ... , is billed as a whodunit, and begins like a regular movie with a screen showing flashbacks, a screaming woman and a corpse. Yet when we're talked through the crime by the master of ceremonies, the rakish Kieron Jecchinis, it soon transpires that this is just another kinky love-in gone awry.

What the audience has to work out is who did what to whom, and why. The Husband ended up smothered by a pillow. Was it The Lover who turned nasty, The Wife who bore a grudge, or the peeping-tom Neighbour? Murphy's technique of loading our field of vision with multiple images almost backfires; the narrative is fiendishly hard to follow. But that may be the point he's trying to make. No witness can be impartial at a party. Not even a stone-cold sober audience, in the face of Murphy's wild, flailing dance sequences and close-up confessions from each character insisting, "I didn't do it, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't. I did." The piece just misses being sordid - it moves too fast to focus on the nasty bits. It's a game - Cluedo for the X-Generation - and for those with the stomach for it, it's utterly gripping to play.

Phoenix: Mansfield Palace (01623 633133), to 20 May; Sheffield Crucible (0114 276 9923), 22 & 23 May; Salisbury Playhouse (01722 320333), 28 & 29 May. V-TOL: Blackpool Grand (01253 290190), Wed; Cambridge Arts (01223 503333), Fri & Sat, Warwick Arts Ctr (01203 524524), 14 & 15 May; Huddersfield Lawrence Bailey (01484 430528), 21 May.