Shobana Jeyasingh, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

Here and elsewhere

Throughout history, new dance forms have tended to be born from one culture brushing up against another. The bracing Anglo-Asian idiom developed by choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh over the past 15 years has travelled a long way from its origins in Bharata Natyam, the bell-jingling, darting-eyed, temple dance tradition of south India. You could say it's a journey that parallels many Asian Britons' experience. And, true to life, the journey has not always been smooth.

In some of her pieces Jeyasingh has deconstructed Indian elements to such extremes of sparseness that their origins are almost erased. In others, she has pursued a formal idea so ruthlessly that, to my eye, the dance has lost its charm. But in her latest piece, Phantasmaton, the classical world is quietly restored to centre-stage, albeit as a backdrop. As Jeyasingh's dancers carve out new variants on the old grammar, images of a traditionally dressed temple dancer glimmer from screens, hovering over her descendants like a smiling ghost. And smile she might, as this is the choreographer's most accomplished and enjoyable work for some years.

As always, Jeyasingh lays down a taut mathematical groundplan, which isn't evident until the final moments, when you realise that the beginning and the end are the same in reverse. The opening image is pretty startling, the kohl-eyed male virtuoso Mavin Khoo shimmering into view almost like a ballerina on pointe. A sense of sexual ambiguity pervades the stage whenever Khoo is on it. One second he's a sleepy young tiger, the next he's launched a machine-gun volley of flick jumps and stamped rhythms. Women join him, melting in and out of smartly synchronised formations in twos and threes. They are unusually handsome dancers, highly individual in looks and build. But Jeyasingh doesn't fully exploit their differences, or invite us to view them as rounded human beings. They are ciphers on a page, ink marks in a design.

There remains something arch and distant about the performance, and it's this, quite as much as the Indian dance motifs, that forms the golden thread attaching Jeyasingh's work to a classical past. Composer Jocelyn Pook's appealing score (traditional South Asian solo singing, layered with wodges of western postminimalism), strikes the same fine balance between the then and now, the here and elsewhere.

j.gilbert@independent.co.uk