HOW frustrating. BalletBoyz founders and dashing Royal Ballet alumni Michael Nunn and William Trevitt did everything right to promote theTalent’s pool of young dancers with plenty of interviews and sensual publicity photographs of the male body at its most beautiful. Yet far too few seats were sold for this breathtakingly brilliant show.

Next time they come to York, and let’s hope they do, theTalent deserve a full house for dance this exhilarating, this sensuous.

Nunn and Trevitt spot the talent, from all walks of dance, not only trained dancers but raw recruits too, of different sizes, dance shapes and nationalities, including Italian and French. Ten men in harmony, dancing together with room for dance principles, but not principals.

The company brought two pieces to York on Wednesday, each introduced on film by the choreographer in another aspect of the BalletBoyz dance experience that works so well.

For the first, entitled Serpent, Liam Scarlett talked of seeking fluidity in his work and from his dancers. They dressed identically, naked to the waist and in nude briefs below, giving them a uniformity of form in a piece that slinked from abstract to narrative to Max Richter’s piano and strings music from his Memoryhouse album.

Russell Maliphant sought to emphasise the group dynamic, the troupe dancing for each other in Fallen, whose combat dress code and abrasive Armand Amar score suggested a military camp. Yet there was often tender teamwork rather than brute force.

They fell in and out of looping outer and inner circles, breaking into solos, duos and myriad configurations, returning to the ten in ever more striking shapes and movements.

This was a night of mesmerising male dancing, balletic, graceful and thrilling but with just the right contemporary edge.