CandoCo, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

Never mind the dead legs, this baby is a runner

In Denmark during the Second World War, the story goes, when Hitler ordered all Jews to wear a yellow armband, thousands of gentiles wore one too, as solidarity. The story is apocryphal, but serves as a metaphor. In a dance company of able and un-able bodies ("integrated" is the current euphemism), you'd think the disabled ones would stick out like sore thumbs. A "dancer" with dead legs? A "dancer" who uses a crutch? What spectator in their right mind would view them with anything but pity?

The beauty of CandoCo – the brainchild of a dancer left in a wheelchair after breaking her neck – is that it robustly rejects any case for special pleading, pitching its work at the highest creative level. What's more, not one of its performers appears markedly less able than another. How so? Everything in a CandoCo show develops out of abilities that exist, rather than abilities that are lacking. If one person can't maintain a standing position, then the choreographer will devise him a dance on the floor. If it's a group dance, then everyone will dance on the floor. You could call it the ultimate leveller.

CandoCo's new programme presents two contrasting approaches to the same set of ... I was going to say problems, but that's too negative. Let's just say that the same seven performers – with 11 working legs between them – appear in both halves of the evening, with dramatically different results.

First, Arthur Pita's The Stepfather, a weird gothic fairytale that develops out of a ballad, "Country Death Song", by the Violent Femmes. I wish I'd paid more attention to the song's lyrics at the start, because I have a hunch they gave a précis of the plot, which would have been useful. As it was, I was too engrossed in the characters: three twittering sisters in Grayson Perry frocks, their mother, a slinky virago who plays the ukulele, and an Alf Garnett in vest and braces, the titular stepfather. This last is creepily played by two men – one of them able-bodied, the other limp from the hips down so that, when clinging round the other's neck, he drags after him like a homunculus, or a trailing shadow of death.

As in a Roald Dahl story, this is fairytale with a sordid twist. Incest, child murder, a hanging, even a hint of necrophilia, are accompanied by a string of perky American tunes, from "Ukulele Lady" to a hillbilly knees up. Relief from grimness is also achieved through physical comedy, with scenes literally re-wound at speed, the music spun into backwards gibberish, the players thrown into a state of retrograde jitters – very funny and most original.

But it was Rafael Bonachela's meticulously crafted virtuoso number that lifted the roof off the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Far from being another take on fairytale, And Who Shall Go To the Ball? is a blast of red-hot physicality powered by a phenomenal score (Scott Walker). Performed against the outline of five double basses strung across the back of the stage like a herd of pachyderms, the work has the true measure of this group: its unique skills (phenomenal speed and precision, plus pirouetting wheelchair) and above all, its daring. When the girl with the crutch topples backwards like a plank, trusting that someone will intervene inches before her skull hits the floor, you don't flinch. That's when you realise the extent of CandoCo's achievement.

Poole Lighthouse (08700 668 701) 16 & 17 October; and touring