Phoenix Dance Theatre, Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield

How to choreograph an abduction

Current affairs rarely make their way into dance, and not necessarily because audiences don't want to know. For all the ability of movement to convey fine shades of meaning, it has never been much good with facts. But that didn't deter the choreographer Darshan Singh Bhuller from making a piece about Bosnia a few years ago. Planted Seeds was an astonishing work – stirring, brutal, ugly in parts, and unforgettable. It was impossible to see it and remain unmoved or uninformed; it achieved as much as a TV documentary, in many more ways.

For his first season as artistic director of Phoenix, Bhuller now tackles another difficult topic: child abduction. But this time there's no need to dwell on the crime itself. What interests Bhuller is its impact on the family and wider community: the way it painfully opens rifts between loved ones, the way it draws strangers close in a shared sense of outrage and powerlessness. He's also interested in the passage of time: how the clock stands still for the stricken, all sense of future swallowed in a vortex of tortured questions about the immediate past. How, for the rest of the world, life carries on.

The work's title, Requiem, tells us all we need to know about the fate of this particular (fictional) child. Other details are supplied by association. The stage is set (by Jamie Vartan) as a shopping mall, walls acting as screens, showing film made grainy to look like CCTV. In themselves these images are clinical, devoid of feeling, yet the powerful emotions of the James Bulger case are unleashed. Later comes another trigger, a home video of a family birthday, and a young girl unwrapping a gift of a football shirt. Tasteless? No, though you sense that Bhuller has thought hard about using these images. So where does dance come into it? On a compositional level, Bhuller draws some of his motifs from news footage, most strikingly the lines of local people sweeping the countryside for clues.

Yet the most searing passages are generated by his efforts to identify imaginatively. One sequence builds on the repeated rush to answer a phone (eventually left to ring). Another has a man literally bouncing off walls with anger and frustration. Most searing (and verging on unwatchable) is a violent duet for the parents, whose grief and remorse seem to seal them into separate hells they cannot share.

Bhuller's greatest skill lies in blending abstract and semi-naturalistic sequences to give a seamless sense of action and inner experience. He is hugely helped in this regard by the music of Jocelyn Pook, which captures perfectly the wildly different moods – a snappy tango for the window-shopping scenes, snatches of requiem mass when hopes begin to fade. The end isn't all bleak: a sub-plot about a couple who fall in love in the search party provides light relief and adds veracity.

The company is blessed with eight fine dancers whose individual qualities come to the fore in the two shorter pieces on the bill – Fin Walker's zany, pugilistic duet Me & You, and Jeremy Nelson's The Fact That It Goes Up, a circuit-board of urban busy-ness that put me in mind of city traffic viewed from a height – before congestion charging.

j.gilbert@independent.co.uk

Gala Theatre, Durham (0191 332 4041), Fri & Sat; Grand, Blackpool (01253 290190), 10 & 11 March; and touring