Threads Dance Company created a spectacular world of dark storytelling, visceral tableaux and powerful bionic dancing. The passages of Tahar Ben Jelloun's novel 'This Blinding Absence of Light', read by Paul Fuller, set us in a dark underworld of loneliness with its melancholic existential contemplations on survival.

Blinding flashes of light revealed the dancers in various striking tableaux before highlighting them against the back wall in a fast-edited film trailer style. Elizabeth Peck's uninhibited use of stillness throughout the piece added a strong dimension to the work as did the various amounts of movement, light and speech in each section.

The dancers themselves were like some strange bionic corrupted ballerinas. They combined exhilaratingly high extensions with a careful nuance of execution and an almost Amazonian sense of strength throughout their bodies. It was only when the number of high legs reached Balanchine quantities did I tire of this aspect of the choreography. The straps and loops built into the costume worked powerfully when suggestive of bondage. Unfortunately in the final section we saw too clearly how easily they were attached so it was impossible to suspend disbelief and share the dancer's bewilderment as she broke through them.

The choreography was extremely audience-friendly in terms of its use of patterns and repetition, much easier to buy into than a tornado of ever-changing ideas. With its exciting and unusual movement vocabulary and the sheer athleticism the dancers had to employ to move in and out of the floor so often, it was never less than engaging. In an early section, there was too much unison for a while which diminished the work slightly, and also the music at the last big section become too upbeat and pop-like given the content of the work. Overall these things were not enough to detract me from feeling like I had been totally immersed within this preternatural world.

WatkinsDance presented 'forget-me-not', a tribute from Anna Watkins to her late mother which, while choreographically seemed composed of many disjointed ideas, was performed by an accomplished company of dancers.