Dance: Three Atmospheric Studies, Sadler's Wells, London</br>Stravinsky Violin Concerto/Voluntaries/Sinfonietta, Royal Opera House, London

Rocket attack? It's not personal

Dance on stage doesn't normally concern itself with politics. After all, until the 20th century it had been in the business of denying the real world: denying the solidity of the flesh, denying the grosser aspects of human existence in stories of the supernatural. But is history sufficient excuse for today's dance-makers to ignore global affairs? Is the big stuff genuinely too complex for the medium to address?

William Forsythe has always been up for a challenge, and in Three Atmospheric Studies - a title deliberately unemotional and detached - he resoundingly answers that question. His context is the conflict in Iraq; his subject, the repellent physical realities of war and the deep-rooted contempt of the invader for the invaded. You might think this impossible to convey without banks of video and screeds of printed explanation, yet Forsythe makes his multi-layered statement using only the capabilities of his 18 dancers. As a pictorial primer, two images are displayed in the theatre's foyer before the show. One is a crucifixion scene by the renaissance painter Cranach. The other is a recent photograph of an exploding shell in a devastated city.

The first 20 minutes after curtain-up are unnervingly silent after four brief words. "My son was arrested," says a woman, pointing to a young man in the group. Frantic action ensues as the dancers enact stylised fragments of this event. It's a melée, frightening in its desperate urgency, yet at the same time forensically precise. After a time you begin to pick out repeated gestures, defensive twists and feints, and other gestures that seem to tell more of the story: the sighting of something in the air, a desperate chase, an accidental death. What makes this so compelling is that its chronology is jumbled and all the elements of the story are visible at once, just as any traumatic event becomes compressed and confused in the memory of those who were there.

The second part of Forsythe's treatment at first promises something more straightforward, and more verbal. The mother sits with a translator trying to explain what happened, but is increasingly frustrated by the way he twists her words. A third element intrudes: a man bizarrely intent on describing things in the manner of an art critic. Those quick on the uptake will spot that he's talking about the painting in the foyer. It's factual, indisputable. Unlike the woman's account, which becomes flimsier to the point of collapse. The sequence ends in mayhem, as Jone San Martin offers a physical and vocal impression of meltdown in her character's mind - uncomfortable to watch in the extreme.

Intellectual that he is, Forsythe has enough of the showman's instinct to know when humour will help him out. As the art critic applies his cataloguing eye to the detritus of a house after a rocket attack ("That's a piece of melted Lego. That's abdominal material") I thought I couldn't take much more. But then Dana Caspersen arrives with the grimly comic star turn of the evening, with help from a gizmo that gives her Texan drawl the pitch of a man's. Here is the ever-confident voice and body language of America. "Ma'am," s(he) addresses the devastated mother in the ruins of her home. "You need to understand that this is not /personal".

In Three Atmospheric Studies, Forsythe may not be doing very much more than reminding us how shaming war is. His achievement is in bringing it so close that it scorches.

Ostensibly, not one of the three works that launched the 2006-07 Royal Ballet season is anything but dance for dance's sake. All are products of 1970s abstraction, yet in their various ways each tells a tale. Balanchine's Stravinsky Violin Concerto is about one genius's complicated response to another. Jiri Kylian's exuberant Sinfonietta (set to Janacek) cheers the newly won political freedoms of Czechoslovakia. And Glen Tetley's Voluntaries is very clearly the creation of a man in thrall to the first moon-landings. Some had queried the wisdom of the company opening the season with an obscure mixed bill rather than a blockbuster. The logic was plain enough to me. After proving itself in the finicky detail of Petipa and Ashton all last year, this was the company's chance to show its rangier paces. The dancers have rarely looked so fit or so glamorously athletic. And the orchestra, under its rightful master Antonio Pappano, rarely so flamboyantly involved

jenny.gilbert@independent.co.uk

* Royal Ballet triple bill: ROH (020 7304 4000) ends tomorrow