Dance: Pity you missed the party, Madam

SIX MONTHS is far too long for a major company to go dark on its core audience. And I'm sure The Royal Ballet wished it otherwise, especially during a period when we sorely needed reminding how good it can be. Currently homeless, the company even managed to turn up late for its founder's 100th birthday, in a short Barbican season 10 days after the event. Sadly, Dame Ninette de Valois was unable to be there (worn out from whooping it up elsewhere, it was said).

Yet Monday's birthday tribute was every British balletomane's dream: Sylvie Guillem, Darcey Bussell, Mukhamedov, Cope, plus an identity parade of almost every living person who has helped give British classical dance its DNA, assembled to introduce excerpts from no less than seven of de Valois's mostly long-lost ballets.

There was Wayne Sleep telling us how Madam, exasperated at his slowness in grasping a tricky bit in Every Goose Can, told him to lie on the floor and waggle his feet above his head. "Now just do it standing up," she snapped. For us, young Matthew Dibble did the honours. And there was Sir Peter Wright, introducing an excerpt from her biblical ballet Job, of 1931, telling us how Madam had always fancied "that Russian" to dance Satan. She meant Mukhamedov, and her hunch was spot on: his near-naked body painted to emphasise his bulk, his eyes blazing, he raged about the stage like a thug about to vandalise William Blake's sunbeams.

The overall effect of this retrospective was more than a memory-trip for oldies: it was a revelation. On the evidence of The Rake's Progress of 1935, the one complete de Valois ballet revived for the event, not only is Madam's choreography gutsy, innovative and clever, but her grasp of theatrical structure is second to none. While de Valois relishes in all the curlicues of 18th-century period detail, she also achieves a starkly modernist overview. What starts out as a costume drama (with Stuart Cassidy preening in a fancy wig) ends up, in the loony bin, an Expressionist vision of hell.

The ballet's sole glimmer of virtue, Sarah Wildor as the Betrayed Girl, excelled even her own peaches-and-cream history of perfections in a sequence of solos which had the entire Barbican Theatre holding its breath in wonder. Her melancholy sewing-dance, created solely from the looping motions of a needle and thread, was unforgettable.

Just as de Valois's work looks utterly different in every piece, so Ashley Page's looks all the same: his women are spike-legged sirens, his men cruel-cool. His choice of music is invariably loud, post-minimalist clamour to which he sends bodies hurtling, wheeling and kung-fu kicking across the stage in waves. I'm not complaining. Cheating, Lying, Stealing, the new piece premiered last Tuesday, refines these themes to a new pitch of excitement, played out on a grander-than-ever scale. And the result is stunning.

Designer Antony McDonald sets the imagination whirring before the dancers even appear. A foggy backdrop of a vast American freeway - headlamps glaring into empty nothingness - alerts us to bleak, transient relationships, a modern spiritual void. To one side is a blue neon divan on which couples pose like elegant couch potatoes, until the divan itself bursts into flames - an insinuating, licking flame which keeps the entire production on slow simmer until it finally erupts in a rolling boil.

The lynchpin of the dance is Irek Mukhamedov's angry loner, a testosterone- powered turbine of whirling leaps and thrusts. His athletic couplings with Viviana Durante's Cruella de Vil-style vamp are relentlessly combative, which makes for a sustained display of sexiness and power. The musical score - by David Lang and Michael Gordon - sets a thumping asymmetrical beat using panpipes and anvils. "Ominous Funk" Gordon calls it, and that might go for the whole ballet. After 35 minutes' erotic brinkmanship from a stunning cast of 14, busy as worker bees around the central couple, Page brings off a coup akin to that of Shakespeare's Birnam Wood as elements of the scenery go on the march, sweeping all of human life away. A brilliant achievement all round.

And so to English National Ballet's much-hyped Romeo and Juliet at the Albert Hall which also, strangely enough, features mobile scenery. At least, the balcony moved even if the earth didn't. Derek Deane's experience of adapting Swan Lake for that vast arena has clearly given him the confidence to try the multiple-mirror trick with other popular works, and at first I was sceptical. The R&J story is known and loved for its intimate focus on two individuals, not for its crowd scenes. Yet Deane's version - played out against Roberta Guidi di Bagno's simple stone-parapet set - succeeds in making the very best of these. The Capulet ball works particularly well, with 100 guests (startlingly lit in blood red) ranged in six long lines, sweeping their cloaks in unison.

But Deane's undoubted skill in animating a huge space fails the central couple, who are given precious few proper dance steps and an awful lot of running in wide circles. (Juliet, when she descends from her balcony, scoots away from Romeo at first to make sure we've all had a good view of her.) But even the derriere of Roberto Bollo (some would say especially the derriere) is worth seeing. And young Tamara Rojo's acting is superb.

'Romeo & Juliet': Royal Albert Hall, SW7 (0171 589 8212), to 30 Jun.