Dance: Birmingham Royal Ballet- Birrmingham Hippodrome

This year, Birmingham's Towards the Millennium festival focuses on the 1950s and, appropriately, the city's resident ballet company has retrieved three works from that decade for its latest triple bill. The combination of Frederick Ashton's Birthday Offering, George Balanchine's Agon and Jerome Robbins's The Cage (both using Stravinsky scores) promises ripe variety. Indeed, straight after the glittering detail and magnificent flourish of Birthday Offering, BRB confronts you with the stark neo-classicism of Agon. The shock factor here has to do with the contrast between these two works, coupled with the fact that only 18 months - and the Atlantic - separate them. Of course, Ashton deliberately set out to make a work that paid homage to Petipa. It should be remembered, too, that, like Ashton, Balanchine made works in which he drew on Petipa's legacy, and that Ashton's keenly modern Symphonic Variations actually preceded Birthday Offering by 10 years. That said, Agon (1957), from the Greek word for contest, still hits you with its sinuous angularity and buoyant expression.

Numerically, Agon's 12 dancers (eight women, four men) coincide with its 12-section construction and the 12-note serialism of Stravinsky's music. In both sound and movement, fractured patterns abound; the work seems to speed past, yet its bold, immediately stated order and unforced progression allow for a multiplicity of quirks and surprises.

Dancers rock on their heels, tilt their hips, splay their fingers and dart playfully and jazzily across each other's paths. Their rhythm is unlike the more conventional and understandable rhythms of ballet dancing. The men's tensile strength is matched by a kind of fitful equilibrium in the women. But all show us movement that keeps tipping and veering into the exciting, momentary sculpture of off-balance states. In the central pas de deux, Monica Zamora and Joseph Cipolla bring a startlingly erotic charge to the choreography's fastidious twists and turns. In a torturous - and often contortionist - duet, Zamora wraps her legs around Cipolla's neck, or lets him continue to support her in arabesque after he has assumed a prostrate position on the floor. All the while their body parts entwine in strange and vivid design.

Robbins's The Cage, created in 1951 and set to Stravinsky's 1946 String Concerto in D, is a sort of feminist-separatist (if that's possible from a man) take on copulation as practised by a colony of female insects. Initiated by the Queen, the Novice (a suitably manic-eyed Monica Zamora) mates all too briefly with her prey (Sergiu Pobereznic) before murdering him. Pobereznic, stabbed in the chest with the tip of Zamora's pointe shoe and subsequently strangled between her legs, is the first of two male intruders to meet his fate: I missed the second rather than miss my train owing to the company's tardiness in getting the curtain down on time. But even on this first, incomplete viewing, The Cage exerted its peculiarly venomous charm.

n Theatre Royal, Plymouth (01752 267222) tonight and tomorrow; and on tour