The Mark Bruce Company, The Place, London Rambert Dance Company, Sadler's Wells, London

The name Mark Bruce registered on hip dance-goers' radar in a big way in the late 1990s. He had the pedigree (he is son of Christopher), he had the wild streak (you needed earplugs at his shows) and he had a knack for big box office that ran counter to the usual hair-shirt tendency of British contemporary dance. The last I remember seeing of his work was a large-scale happening at the South Bank with rock royalty P J Harvey bawling her lungs out alongside Bruce's dancers. The Queen Elizabeth Hall was packed and the crowd went crazy.

And then he disappeared, to re-emerge seven years later with a new company and an ambitious new show called Sea of Bones, which continues to tour right into November. Once again it draws on Bruce's taste for the anarchic thump of heavy rock, setting tracks by Nick Cave, Polly Harvey, Tom Waits and The Kills, but this time there is a mysterious undercurrent of ancient history, as well as surprising tenderness and eroticism. There's a flicker of narrative, too, which comes and goes in the most tantalising way.

When was the last time you saw someone wearing woad? No wonder Boudicca hit on it as a ploy to scare off the Roman invaders. It gives a ghoulish cast to Bruce's seven lusty dancers, so that even when they appear in modern dress - as a soldier looking for his waitress girlfriend, or as rock groupies mobbing their guitarist hero - there's a warrior savagery about them. Sea of Bones suggests we are all inhabited by ancient archetypes, haunted by characters from folklore and myth.

The link in this sequence of semi-narrative vignettes is the figure of Orpheus, whom Bruce presents as a rock star, storming about the stage Mick Jagger-style while pouting and thrashing his instrument. The Bad Seeds' "The Lyre of Orpheus" fills in the story, describing - with a lurid relish - how he first made the lyre, discovered its power, then played it to his wife as she lay ill in bed, the shock of it promptly finishing her off.

Cue a trip to Hades, a smoky nightclub whose dazed inhabitants wander around clutching severed heads, which Guy Hoare's lighting renders wonderfully spooky. Then - in no particular order it seemed - there was an in-your-face pole-dancing session with the Sirens, dressed fetishistically as cowgirls in big hats and tiny leather minis; a scary, hair-shaking thrash of a sequence for the Harpies, who then mob the soldier-hero and leave him for dead; a love duet set to Nick Cave's gorgeous "Sweetheart Come" in which the yearnings of a modern couple are echoed by Forces sweethearts - their own grandparents, perhaps. The final vignette shows a haunted marriage ceremony, in which the bride's dress is a tattered shroud and the stage flutters with dead leaves.

It's as if Bruce has tried to write a love story which the collective unconscious has repeatedly attempted to blight. To say that the show has a dreamlike quality belies the ferocity of its delivery. It's more like a series of linked nightmares - by turns sketchily perceived and vivid - leaving an overpowering impression of the cycle of sex and death repeating itself over and over: love awash on a sea of bones.

I wish there had been anything half as memorable in the Rambert Dance Company's new programme, premiered at Sadler's Wells on Tuesday. Best of the three pieces was from the Canadian Andre Gingras, whose Anatomica #3 was a lot more fun than it looked on paper. The choreographer wanted "to propose the idea of the body as exhibition site", and we duly saw 18 dancers in mufti balefully eyeing the front stalls and baring bits of themselves to show supposed bruises and scars: a damaged liver here, a broken rib there, even a bloodshot eye.

But Gingras started and ended with a twinkle in his eye. Imagine, if you will, HM The Queen doing a restrained little heel-and-toe and royal wave routine to the strains of Javanese gamelan. With that hat-and-handbag combo, the neat grey perm, it couldn't be anyone else. Then imagine 18 HMs performing in synch (and some of them have hairy legs). Eat your heart out, Andy Warhol. Quite what this has to do with "the body as exhibition site" is anyone's guess. But it's exquisitely done, nicely restrained, and both funny and rather touching. It segues into a wildly energetic sequence which sees a rabble of young down-and-outs scooting up a pyramid of mattresses and flinging themselves suicidally from the top. If there was a message, I missed it, but it barely mattered with so much to look at and to listen to. Plaudits go to Fabrice Serafino for the witty design, and Joseph Hyde for the music, generated live from the pit using a selection of kitchenware and old plumbing pipes. Mesmerising.

jenny.gilbert@independent.co.uk

Mark Bruce Co: Diversions Dance House, Cardiff (02920 304 400) Tue; and touring