Rambert Dance Company, Sadler's Wells, London

Rambert goes clubbing

You can't blame Christopher Bruce for going again to a genre that has suited him well in the past. His new ballet Grinning in Your Face is another of his anthologies of folksy characters and incidents. Among them are such hits as "Sergeant Early's Dream" and "Moonshine", and I suppose we could also count "Rooster" and his older John Lennon ballet Working Class Hero.

If I found the latest work a lot less gripping, that must be because for me the music this time doesn't hold so much drama. It comes from an album of guitar songs which are arranged and performed by Martin Simpson, mostly his own pieces but including one each by Paul Anka, Cat Stevens and Bob Dylan. What Bruce says he hears in them is rural America of the middle 20th century, as shown in photographs, novels and films.

Many episodes have the familiar Bruce liveliness, especially those built around the tall, compelling figure of Miranda Lind, whether dancing a curious duet with Simon Cooper (misnamed in the cast list), whose eager advances she treats with reserve, or as a mother figure for some of the other women. But to my mind it doesn't work as a whole, as music or ballet, especially in the darker mood that comes from the men at the end, with its emphasis on war and death.

Others may be luckier, and the cast anyway give it with conviction. Which is more than I can say of Christopher Bruce's other ballet on the programme, a revival of Land. What has happened to the theatricality and distinctive personalities this work had when originally given by London Festival Ballet? Rambert now presents this dance drama based on Arne Nordheim's Warshawa, evoking occupied Warsaw, like a bland family picnic bizarrely interrupted by a rape, which makes a nonsense of it.

Stephen Lade's piano solo for this was the only live music all evening. Presumably thrift dictated this choice of ballets; but we were given an extra work, the previously unannounced première of Linear Remains, by one of the dancers, Rafael Bonachela. He gets a great deal of energy from his cast of nine, performing mostly angular steps with bent knees; it's quite inventive, and if there's a lack of development, that comes from the monotonous score by Christian Fennesz.

The outstanding experience, I thought, in this second of Rambert's two London programmes was Gaps, Lapse and Relapse, first given three or four years ago. Clubbing is definitely not my scene, but the skill and originality of Jeremy James's choreography has grown on me with repeated viewing: the way he used simple movements (or even non-movement, such as Miranda Lind standing "grinning in our face") in fascinatingly ingenious patterns and developments to provide the portrait of a generation. The composer, Peter Morris, writes of its raw enthusiasm, and the cast give it as if they agree with him. The early death of this work's young choreographer was a real loss to dance.