This was a really enjoyable show with a lot of humour and also some impressive serious work.

They started with Technical Study, a piece that brought the whole company onstage to give us a glimpse of what they do in training. But, between themselves and choreographer Joelle Pappas, they made this into an entertaining work, which gave us an immediate look at the talents and abilities of each dancer.

In Inspired by a Synth, Callum Ruddock threw himself around, or was thrown around, by the music of Pink Floyd. His jerky convolutions were hilarious, and his bespectacled Clark Kent persona was hugely likeable. He drew the audience into his piece through his strong personality.

Ania Beauclerk and Dylan Hay constructed a nice short piece based on five written sentences, and Emily Wheeler’s Walk in the Rain contained some interesting, angular movement.

For Riveting Drive! 20 members of the audience were tasked with presenting a press cutting of their choice to one of the 20 dancers, who then improvised on the subject. Some nice movement was seen, but it would have made sense to let the audience in on the subjects to which they were responding.

Charis Taplin gave the most assured and polished performance of the evening in Bamiyan. Inspired by the empty niches in the sandstone cliffs of Afghanistan, from which huge figures of Buddha have been removed by the Taliban, ( we saw beautiful shots of these ), she sought to explore ‘concepts of transience, spiritual endurance and the poetry of brokenness’. You can’t actually mime these concepts, but her expressive, out-reaching style conveyed the atmosphere extremely well. Tom Roberts did a neat, quick solo to the music of his own band Balloon Ascents, and the finale was another full company piece, based on the rituals of wild animals.

The dancer who impressed me most of all only took part in the group dances, but did so with a lot of style and panache. Young Niamh Robinson, who must be at the very start of the company’s 14 to 25 years age range, has clearly done a lot of work on her technique, but equally importantly, she has a real feeling for dance, and knows that dance, however serious, is also show-business.