There is good news for ballet lovers in China, if they missed Rambert Company's show during last year's Shanghai International Arts Festival in November.

Britain's flagship contemporary dance company will return to China to grace the capital's stage at the Tianqiao Theatre, January 23 to 25.

Established in 1926, the Rambert Dance Company, Britain's oldest ensemble, has defined the country's dance scene, developed new idiosyncratic talents, and generally just made the public aware of the pleasures that dance can bring. Even after nearly 80 years on the stage, the Rambert group is still adding vigor to both the ballet and contemporary dance scenes.

The company is committed to presenting the broadest possible range of contemporary repertoire, staging established works from choreographers of international status alongside the new and challenging. This offers audiences quality and innovation in equal measure.

The programs this time around are thrilling, including three of last season's hits -- 21, Living Toys and Pre-Sentient -- and a revised 1990 work entitled Visions Fugitives.

About celebrity worship, 21 is a collaboration between Barcelona-born choreographer Rafael Bonachela and British pop star Kylie Minogue.

Not only does the piercing little voice of Minogue feature in Benjamin Wallfisch's accompanying score, but her appearance casts a giant video spell over the dancers during the whole of the work's middle section.

After it premiered last spring, 21 helped Minogue steal all the headlines.

The diminutive pop star is projected on a backdrop screen as a gigantic, glamorous, distressed ghost, whispering and batting her eyelashes sorrowfully, while Rambert's dancers are seem stoically business-like before her image.

"I asked Kylie to be part of this work because I thought she was an amazing, unique performer, and a lovely person," the choreographer explained.

"But I wanted her to be involved in a way that would be interesting to her, as well as different from what she does every day. Kylie exists in the piece as an icon, a projection."

Living Toys choreographed by Karole Armitage is inspired by British composer Thomas Ades' dark and sinister score of the same name.

The work involves all of Rambert's 22 dancers and takes viewers into a world where dreams and consciousness merge and where life's cruelties and beauties are encountered.

Armitage's choreography shows off the dancers' agility and technical brilliance.

It is tied tightly to the music, creating complicated moods and changes in atmosphere.

The movement is intricate and daring, sometimes gentle, sometimes aggressive, but always intellectually and physically fascinating.

Visions Fugitives is a very early (1917) 22-minute Prokofiev score divided into 20 short sections of amazing textual diversity -- some are symphonic, some popular and others dark and brooding.

It's a major challenge to a choreographer to make maximum impact from such minimal material. Van Manen succeeds by paring everything to its formal essentials, even while introducing quirky twists.

Dressed in flattering striped Lycra, set to pleasant Prokoviev, it has all the Van Manen signatures -- sly humor, sexual tension, precise, eloquent classical-modern phrasing -- that make his works a staple of dance companies.

Few choreographers can handle sex with more chic than Van Manen, the Dutch choreographer. Visions Fugitives consists of 20 vignettes of sexual attraction and reactions between three men and three women, to Prokofiev's fleeting little pieces.

Wayne McGregor's turbo-charged ballet Pre-Sentient also provides Rambert with a much greater challenge to their speed, balance and exactness.

Performance details:

Dates: January 23 - 25

Venue: Tianqiao Theatre

Ticket Price: 880 - 120

Booking: 010-83156358、13311028592

Online booking: www.superticket.com.cn

(China Daily January 20, 2004)