Bangarra Dance Theatre, Sadler's Wells London

Dreamtime to modern times

Australia is often described as a young country. That's true only if you discount the people whose home it was for the previous 40,000 years. Bangarra Dance Theatre was set up in the late 1980s to give popular expression to Australia's all-but-obliterated Aboriginal cultures in a way that extends beyond the endlessly reproduced dot paintings and didgeridoos. Under its long-time but still-young director Stephen Page (who, despite his English name, is a direct descendant of the Yugambeh tribe of south-east Queensland), Bangarra has since become one of the more successful elements in Australia's wavering political effort to build bridges with the remnants of the societies it pushed aside, as well as a platform for what is almost certainly the oldest belief system in the world.

If Page's intention in Bush had been merely to give physical form to his personal researches into his ancestral rituals and stories, it might - paradoxically - have been more accessible to a British audience. As it is, he complicates things by trying to mesh an ancient spirituality with a sense of what it is to be a modern, urban Aboriginal, with a dirty great hole where an entire way of life used to be. While the best parts of the show - which feels long for its 75 minutes - are a lush and hypnotic celebration of nature as perceived by the Dreamtime creation stories that come from the region now called Arnhem Land in Northern Australia, other sections suggest not much beyond girls in strappy tops doing a Jane Fonda workout in downtown Sydney.

In some ways it's a shame that Bangarra is not making this British tour (part of a year-long UK season of Australian arts called Undergrowth) one of his earlier works, which tended to be more political: reminders of colonial misdeeds. I wanted to like Bush more than I did, perhaps because I'd learnt, just before seeing the show, that it was made just after the choreographer's brother Russell Page, a dancer in the company, had taken his own life, only hours after performing in one of his brother's dances. It certainly helped to be able to interpret at least some of the sections of the piece in relation to this devastating personal event - particularly one rather beautiful, wrenching solo for a bare-chested man who finally drops with what looks like exhausted relief into the embrace of an ancient Aboriginal woman in full mud-paint. But the rest of the Sadler's Wells audience was not necessarily party to my information. I sensed shuffling and heard yawns.

The pivotal figure on stage is Kathy Balngayngu Marika, from Yirrkala - where, I am told, "she is a senior woman of her clan and a leader in regenerating land". In other words, as close as we're going to get to The Real Thing. Her presence is quiet and powerful, and one of the reasons she has such presence is that is she is neither a dancer, nor an actor. She simply lets her life speak through the fact of her living flesh. The still and impassive sight of this steel-wool-haired old woman, sitting gazing at the floor, occasionally sweeping it with her hand as if taking possession of the dust, is easily the most pregnant image in the show.

There are other memorable things: a line of women moving low in a slithery, reptilian crawl, silhouetted in a slender band of light which I guess gives some small idea of the famous first few seconds of early dawn in the outback; a lone black woman writhes in some kind of spiritual transport as white feathers fall on her from the sky; dancers mimic the motion of lizards; a quivering moth emerges from its cocoon. The danced animal imagery is strong but there could have been more of it.

The music by David Page (another brother) and Steve Francis creates more tensions and high points than the choreography properly deserves, drawing on Aboriginal chants, Aboriginal speech, some terrific rock drumming and the haunting natural sounds of the outback, but rather spoiling their pitch with a duo of harmonising high-pitched sopranos straight out of Cirque du Soleil.

At best, Bush did teach me something, though not a lot, about the creation stories from Arnhem Land. I'm left with a greater respect for the intangible remnants of a culture that, for all that's been done to destroy it, persists in the conviction that human existence and the universe are one.

Jenny.gilbert@independent.co.uk