The Critics: BRB take it to the burn

Dance

Birmingham Royal Ballet Sadler's Wells, EC1

Have you tried the new Crunchie bars, the ones with "popping candy" inside? Each bite is extraordinary: an explosion on the palate, followed by a scatter-bomb effect on the nerve-endings, tailing off in a starburst of general happy feelings. Well. I had a similar sensation last week at Sadler's Wells, watching Birmingham Royal Ballet's triple bill.

The most obvious feelgood element was the new ballet by Twyla Tharp - new to BRB, that is. In the Upper Room, first performed in 1986 by Tharp's company in Illinois, is a 40-minute buzz, ending on such an energy high that the packed house erupted. This isn't ballet as we know it. It's more like a mass sports warm-up: jogging, arm-swinging, hip-swivelling, air-swimming, casual yet rigorous, aiming for the ultimate burn. The dancers wear trainers, and the look of conspicuous zeal you see on dedicated types in a gym. A chugging, triumphalist score by Philip Glass spurs them on.

Into these sassy workout patterns shoots a trio of ballet girls wearing ankle socks and red point shoes, all scissor-angles and spite. Tharp is famous for her blend of styles, for mixing classical with street slouch, and here she polarises the two, looking a little askance at ballet to show its conventions as quirks: its inhuman balances and symmetries, its twiddly little steps. Yet Upper Room doesn't feel like a study in style. It's more a barn-storming assault on empty space. Figures hurtle along the diagonal paths of Jennifer Tipton's glancing lighting scheme, sometimes jogging backwards, like a film on fast rewind.

Birmingham's dancers attack the hybrid choreography with speed and verve, but as yet they don't quite hit the tricky Tharp balance between casualness and precision. On opening night the geometry of some group passages was somewhat less than true. But Dorcas Walters and Grace Maduell are exhilarating as the leading strong-women (did I really see Maduell catch a leaping Andrew Murphy in her arms?) and the sheer enjoyment of the company is infectious.

It's far from obvious what or where is the Upper Room of the title. There's nothing spiritual in the piece, unless you regard the late-Eighties gym fetish as a form of religious observance.

More explicit in this regard is the ballet David Bintley has set to John Tavener's searing orchestral score The Protecting Veil, reviewed on these pages when it premiered last year. A contemplation on the various feasts of the Virgin Mary in the Greek Orthodox calendar, it attempts to match what Tavener called an "icon" in sound to a corresponding icon in movement.

On the vast stage at Sadler's Wells, it looks even more impressive. Ruari Murchison's simple wall of gold leaf glimmers dimly as if lit by church candles, etches a Blakean sunrise for the Virgin's transfiguration, and dazzles to proclaim the resurrection. Christ's cross is a single column of ruched brown silk which ingeniously slips away to reveal a golden ladder pointing the way to Heaven. This is design which almost inspires worship in itself.

Of the seven dancers who take turns to represent the Virgin, Leticia Muller is remarkable in sustaining a sense of glory and goodness solely by manipulating the said veil. Sylvia Jiminez creates stunning painterly poses as the virgin mother (the veil now becoming a new-born bundle) and Sabrina Lenzi levitates movingly in the mysterious business of Mary's "dormition". Ultimately, though, for all its spiritual uplift, I'm still not convinced that Tavener's rapturous but slow-moving score lends itself to drama. I think he meant us to listen with our eyes shut.