Dance To Music by Steve Reich, Barbican London <Br/> Marjorie's World Unhinged, Gardner Arts Centre Brighton

I shall say it again. Shall I say it again?

Over the last 40 years dance has championed many kinds of new music, but the output of Steve Reich has probably enjoyed the biggest slice of the cake. Joining in the transatlantic bash marking the New Yorker's 70th birthday, the Barbican and Dance Umbrella set out to show how his distinctive rhythmic repetitions have got under the skin of three markedly different dance-makers.

First off the block was the Belgian Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker with her response to Reich's austere early period. Someone within my hearing likened its effect to being hit repeatedly over the head with a spoon, and there's no disputing that Piano Phase and Violin Phase, both composed in 1967 and relayed, by necessity, on tape, are maddeningly insistent - that's the point. Both are abstract formal studies which play with the electronic technique whereby a repeated melodic pattern is split into layers which gradually and sneakily fall out of synch and diverge.

Keersmaeker is happy not to meddle with this format, and offers us its visual match: two figures (Keersmaeker herself and Tale Dolven) in a repeated pattern of arm-swinging walks and revolving turns. With their grey frocks, ankle socks and disengaged expressions the pair have the air of faintly naughty schoolgirls, particularly when they allow their frocks to flip up to show their knickers, the rhythm marching on unbroken. Violin Phase is a solo for Keersmaeker, and makes explicit what was implicit before: an Expressionist undercurrent that ends in a Munch-like silent scream (how did she guess how I was feeling?).

The rest of the show never quite matches up. Richard Alston's contribution is too lyrical and polite to be much more than decoration, though typically he goes the extra mile and sets not only the cantata Reich composed to the words of Wittgenstein ("how small a thought it takes to fill a whole life" - for which read "how many repetitions it takes to fill an evening of Steve Reich"), but also the 13th-century motet that inspired it. Whenever live music is allowed on stage, there's a chance that it will hog the focus, and for all the ardent coiling and wheeling of Alston's 10 dancers, it was the piping alertness of Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices that gripped me. All the drama was there.

Akram Khan showed so much less deference to his score that it made me wonder how long he'd had to get to know it. His segment, set to the newly written Variations for Vibes, Piano and Strings, had a distinctly sketchy feel, with Khan and his fellow two dancers at one point marking time by mimicking the gestures of London Sinfonietta's conductor Alan Pierson. Again, the sheer virility of the on-stage music-making dwarfed Khan and friends' efforts, especially once the score reached its propulsive climax of fortissimo bonging and scraping. Yes, Reich's music on tape does lend itself to dance, but centre-stage it's far too interesting to watch.

Choreographer Maresa von Stockert has used taped commentary to good effect. In her award-winning Gri[m]m Tales a droll male-voice narration left her free to create freakish images on stage that didn't need to explain themselves. She returns to the fomula in her new touring piece, Marjorie's World Unhinged, but comes badly unhinged in the process.

Even with twists in the telling, the Grimms' fairytales had an emotional logic that von Stockert's own-brand fable lacks. Marjorie is a panicked, ageing ballerina. She has a sister who runs a ballet school, a husband who works in a balloon factory and a son who tries on her dresses while she's out. This narrative, I can only guess, was devised to link von Stockert's disparate visual ideas, some dazzlingly inventive, but all undermined by uncertain tone and context. I loved the ceiling-rose view of a ballet class, the dancers in fact lying on the floor to execute their barre exercises. I loved the monstrous Siamese-twin ballet mistresses. The hallucinatory factory sequences are clever. But nothing hangs together, and we don't care whether these characters live or die, let alone what they feel about encroaching crow's feet. Any one of Stockert's best ideas might have made a narrative start. But this goes everywhere and nowhere.

Jenny.gilbert@independent.co.uk

* 'Marjorie's World Unhinged': Lakeside, Nottingham (0115 846 7777) Tues; Miskin Theatre, Dartford (01322 629422) Fri & Sat; touring