Delicate hands, feet of artistry

DANCE

Forty years on it's safe to say that the classical forms of Indian dance are now as well established in this country as the people who brought them here. Pakistan-born, Birmingham-based Nahid Siddiqui has set out to explore what she calls the broad horizons of her native Kathak dance - giving a contemporary, though not necessarily anglicised, slant to its distinctive rhythmic and story-telling style. But watching her impressionistic new work Prism at the Purcell Room this week made you wonder just who she is doing it for.

The audience on Wednesday may not have been typical - I spotted few Asian faces along the rows - but there was a palpable sense of delighted relief when, towards the end of the piece, Siddiqui slipped briefly into traditional mode, flicking out her wrists, stamping her bare heels and shivering her hips to the age-old sound of a tabla. Salutary and uplifting, it was like hearing a burst of a Bach Partita after an hour of Michael Nyman. Siddiqui meant merely to show us where she'd come from, but left a question over why she ever left.

Which is not to say that Siddiqui and her company of three young women don't do some lovely things. In place of heavy jewellery and garish colours, they wear simple tunics of pale grey, moving with a smooth meditativeness in and around a backcloth which they transform into an ocean, a sail, a shroud and a wedding marquee. What undermines this delicate imagery at every turn is the Bollywood-style musical score - crassly Westernised ragas played by a thousand synthesised cellos, and what you swear must be Hank Marvin's debut on sitar.

Who would believe that the percussive steps of Kathak once took their cue from the myriad tonal subtleties of the tabla? As the tabla player could sound distinct syllables on the skin of a small drum, so the Kathak dancer could "speak" with the soles of her feet, each part of the foot producing a minutely different slap or thud. This terrible soupy music is no match for any such dialogue. It would be better off accompanying an Indian takeaway.

Yet in the end Siddiqui's artistry overrides even the solecisms of the score. A mature beauty with a single plait dangling to her waist, she can switch from hauteur to girlish joy in the graceful flick of an arm, and imbue a long-held pose with vibrant emotion. It's not fanciful to imagine her vigorous pirouettes, spinning long and hard on the flat of her heels, as a jubilant symbol of the turning world. Her quality comes from being mistress of a long tradition. It would be tragic if she lost touch with that.

The joy of playing with new technology is that the page is a blank - there's nothing to live up to. Choreographer Mark Murphy has in the past experimented with layers of dance and film-of-dance, adding separate monologue and close-ups to suggest, beside the dance action, what's going on in his characters' heads. It's clever. By Force of Fantasy, the latest work for his company V-TOL, takes the multi-media theme to what must be some kind of human limit. At one time we are confronted by five perspectives of the same scene, via transparent front-drop, two layers of live action, and film on a split screen. It's dizzying. But it's entirely appropriate to Murphy's theme - the parallel universe of fantasy and reality, and the folly of believing that sexual fulfilment is found in living out your dreams.

Murphy's furiously athletic movement style adapts well to the bedroom, oddly enough. The name V-TOL is a military acronym for "vertical take-off and landing", and the five dancers do it justice, vaulting deftly over a double bed, rolling in supernatural unison and leaping in flying diagonals into each other's arms and back, like video on fast- forward and reverse. A series of interior monologues written by Gary Young chart the characters' ill-fated couplings, spoken, among others, by Tamsin Greig, aka Debbie in The Archers, a connection that was hard to ignore. Hearing her murmur lasciviously "Watching is better than doing it," I cannot have been the only one half-expecting Aunt Peggy to appear and put a stop to the hanky-panky. As Mark Murphy shows, it's impossible to control where one fantasy stops and another begins.