Preview: View From The Shore/Jacky Lansley Dance Theatre, Hall for Cornwall, Truro

A shore thing with body language

How do you evoke Cornish coastal landscape through dance? This is what the choreographer Jacky Lansley has set out to do, with the help of members of the Cornish Sinfonia performing Lindsay Cooper's Concerto for Sopranino Saxophone and Strings.

View from the Shore has taken Lansley two years to choreograph. "The music creates a wonderful emotional context. It has a very interesting dialogue between the violins and the saxophone. There is a breathing in to the saxophone that sounds like the waves of the seas."

"I have had a long relationship with Cornwall," explains Lansley. "I have been developing a movement vocabulary that is informed by rock formation, by texture, and the body memory of being in those spaces. I am interested in everyday gesture transformed into dance."

Lansley danced with the Royal Ballet before attending the London School of Contemporary Dance, and has worked extensively at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester. A prime mover in setting up independent dance spaces since the Seventies, her first site-specific commission was in 1974 as part of Edinburgh Arts 74. She recalls: "One brave moment I waded out of the sea with my collaborator Sally Potter, in evening dress and flippers to meet a parallel couple dressed in white. It was wild."

Lansley has gone on to choreograph two of Potter's films, Orlando and The Man who Cried. She opened her own studio, Dance Research Studio Project, in 2002, and her company has developed and produced several new works, including Holding Space, performed at the Royal Opera House's Clore Studio space in 2004. The evening continues with Anamule Dance, made with the composer Jonathan Eato, and danced to crackling recordings of the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton.

Hall For Cornwall, 18 and 19 January; then Clore Studio Upstairs, Royal Opera House, London, 25 to 27 January ( www.hallforcornwall.co.uk; www.roh.org.uk)