This is Rambert – the dance company that never stands still

In its 100-year existence, Rambert has undergone bold change under the seven artistic directors who followed its founder Marie Rambert, each of whom has shaped the company in their image.

The current incumbent Benoit Swan Pouffer has a European sensibility and a business plan that sets popular blockbusters such as Peaky Blinders and the forthcoming It’s a Sin, based on Russell T Davies’s hit drama about the Aids crisis, alongside bills of more abstract work. He also has an extraordinary eye for dancers, and in each of the three works in this celebratory package the company shimmer with skill, emerging both as strongly etched individuals and as a perfectly synchronised group.

Their individuality is most on display in the premiere of the intriguing In Crimson, choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber who both danced with the influential Batsheva Dance Company. Its mood is set by the score, played live by its composer Yonatan Daskal, initially on a upright piano, then on a keyboard. Snatches of Bach and Caruso singing Bizet supplement his own compositions.

Performed in front of red velvet curtains, with the seven dancers fiercely defined by Nadav Barnea’s uplighting, the work is a series of encounters, both real and surreal. There’s a sense of a story: couples coming together and parting, a group excluding one woman, a hint of a fight, a man constantly needing support. The movement is fluent, responsive, full of deep back bends and little hops and pattering steps. It’s beautiful and mysterious.

Hop(e)storm by (La)Horde, the fashionable French collective who just love a bracket, is an exhilarating piece – a rave-tinged vision of lindy hop, with lines in perfect unison forming shifting patterns. Eric Wurtz’s lighting lends a sense of late-night seriousness, but the steps are thrilling, the dancers’ energy seemingly inexhaustible, until it ends in an embrace.

The concluding piece, Gallery of Consequence, by the Dutch choreographer Emma Evelein, is set in an airport, full of travellers swinging and striding wheeled cases across the floor, bathed in squares of light. But this is a place where the departure board announces “depressed”, “isolated” and “scared” as boarding states, and the stylised movement of journeys is quickly replaced by passages of more emotional dance. Quirky and sophisticated, it ends on a clever dying fall, one dancer alone in a spotlight, as Come Wander with Me, a song from The Twilight Zone, sounds over the Tannoy while passengers depart.

As this birthday party shows, Britain’s oldest dance company looks in fine form to stay around for another century.

Photograph by Hugo Glendinning