PHOENIX Dance Theatre's first touring show under the artistic direction of the fabulously-named Venezuelan choreographer Javier De Frutos has no title. However, there is nothing anonymous about this calling card.
His first flight of the Phoenix 2007 is as sensual and sexy as it is scary.
Your reviewer saw this show at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, before the addition of the Depression-era counterpoint of Jane Dudley's short solo piece from 1938, Harmonica Breakdown.
Set to the blues of Sonny Terry, no doubt it will provide reflective contrast with the adrenaline rush of a trio of ultramodern, exhilarating ensemble works.
The night bursts into life with the booming tribal rhythms of Japanese Taiko drums in Henri Oguike's Signal, wherein a quintet of dancers, hands on sensuous hips, strikes up repetitive patterns of movement that echo the insect and animal world. As the heat and intensity rises, it is apt that fire suddenly consumes the stage.
The most playful piece is Pequenas Alegrias, which marks the British choreographic debut of Henrique Rodovalho in the last Phoenix commission by former artistic director Darshan Singh Bhuller.
Translated as Little Happinesses, this multi-media work is light and frothy and suffused with the spirit of Brazilian beaches, and its fusion of contemporary and classical dance, samba and electronica has the dancers gyrating joyously to blobs of light projected on to their bodies.
The technology may be a little cumbersome, but this ebullient piece defies you not to smile like a hippie.
Admittedly, it is merely an amusée bouche when stood against the dripping steak of De Frutos's extraordinary, disturbing Los Picadores, danced to the death to the choral clamour of Stravinsky's Les Noces.
Intensified still further by fight director Terry King, this is savagely beautiful and carnal, precise as the matador baiting the bull in the ring, yet emotionally it careers out of control as four men and two women fight and spit, kick and grapple until the weakest body gives out.
De Frutos calls it a "stag party gone very, very wrong". Cut and bleeding, his dancers are worked to the point of bodily punishment. One hell of a party, one hell of a dance.
Phoenix Dance Theatre, York Theatre Royal, tonight at 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568
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