Verve, the postgraduate performance company of the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, performed a mixed bill, including work by Lea Anderson, Akram Khan and New Adentures Choreograper Award winner James Cousins, to a packed house at The Place. This is a company of technically strong dancers who share a common strength and solidity in their physicality which the various works showed off to full advantage.

First up was Let Go by Milan Kozanek, which was billed as being formed from 'hidden impulses in the body that create the outward visible movements' and that the material was created by the dancers allowing their bodies to fall and collapse while moving with stones in their hands. This sounded like an interesting premise for a dance work, and the piece certainly began promisingly with the dancers dramatically exploding across the stage and then forming various clusters and groupings while moving across the floor in a strange alien almost centipede-like fashion. It was like watching a David Attenborough documentary of an insect life form, especially as the work invited an anthropomorphistic reading as the 'centipedes' formed various social groupings, seemingly mated and fought, while outsiders circled warily and large groups curled up comfortably together on the floor.

From this powerful beginning with well-developed and non-human movement vocabulary, an evolution occurred and very quickly all the dancers were walking upright and the piece changed into a display of standard contemporary technique style choreography and, worst of all, employed several times the awful contemporary dance cliché of all the dancers rushing towards one corner of the stage and staring outwards for prolonged periods of time, anticipation building, before dispersing with nothing of note actually happening. I actually had to check the programme to see whether the company had moved onto the next piece of the evening as this section seemingly bore no relationship to the far more interesting section that had happened previously.

The second piece was my first chance to see James Cousins' choreography. I was slightly apprehensive that all the promotion he has received would make it more disappointing if I didn't like his work, but rewardingly that proved not to be a problem. Dark in the Afternoon was a forceful, muscular duet which used a tribal, ritualistic movement vocabulary to explore a complex, dysfunctional relationship between its dancers. Cousins' eye for detail was apparent with as much attention having been paid to the rhythm of the movement, particularly with contrasting 'impacts' and 'impulses' and to the postioning of the body in space, as to the actual shapes the dancers were making. The phrasing and musicality built into the choreography was extremely strong and this was danced beautifully, although somewhat hyper-technically. The piece was supposed to be about a difficulty to communicate on an emotional level between the dancers, and there was a definite disconnection between them although I felt at times this was because they were pushing the performance of the material as far as they could, rather than because of the work's theme. Perhaps this was one of their 'preoccupations' but I would have liked to have seen them perform with more depth to their characterisation, more heart and less technical showing off.

The premise of For Dear Life by Jordan Massarella was the one I found most interesting in the programme, billed as a celebration of a state of mind of magical thinking: a belief that if you hope for something enough, or perform the right actions, a seemingly unavoidable event can be averted; unless you learn to accept change you will always suffer. Unfortunately, the choreography was relatively clunky and literal. The majority of the stage was quite dark and there was broad strip of bright light downstage. Most of the dancers spent the majority of their time searching about in the dark while one in particular had grasped the benefit of being in the strip of light and was repeatedly drawn back to it. The movement itself started off relatively conventional and safe but soon became a lot more interesting. Tom Tindall particularly stood out: his performance was very expressive and melancholy whereas the majority of the dancers were moving wonderfully but not emotionally.

The ending of the piece was the most interesting with the majority of the dancers having been "enlightened" in the downstage strip of light except for Tindall. While the other dancers had had their burdens lifted from them, he was left in dark throes of writhing and performed some incredible transitions into and out of the floor. At the end of the piece, he managed to reach the other dancers and was pulled into an embrace with one: had he reached a redemption of sorts? Perhaps he had just accepted his fate. The idea for this piece has a lot of potential but would benefit from more of the positive thinking being danced rather than mimed (the negative emotions were expressed powerfully through movement), and for more subtlety to be applied to its staging.

The comedic talents of the dancers were brought to the fore in Lea Anderson's (formerly artistic director of the now sadly disbanded Cholmondeleys and Featherstonehaughs) Dynamo. Describing this piece in a single sentence, the programme stated that Dynamo is 'a syncopated engine assembled by nine constructivist components in a tripartite of accelerating machinations'. The dry tone belied the humour that Anderson found in using the dancers as components in machine-style combinations. Each dancer was dressed differently in colourfully-checked A-line dresses which called to mind hippies and 'flowers in your hair' while they danced as small cogs in a much larger machine.

The choreography worked best when the individual movement of the dancers, even when performing the same actions, was incorporated. There will always be an incongruity between different bodies attempting to do the same thing at the same time, and the choreography riffed on this to great effect. In the third 'machine', the music took on a driving beat, almost like pop or dance music but not that cheesy, and the overall effect was similar to watching an interesting music video: think along the lines of Kylie's 'Can't get you outta my head' when they are wearing the red plastic hoods/visors. Especially enjoyable was when the piece took on a fashion catwalk tone and the dancers started manipulating and controlling each other like dolls; this was heightened by the dancers’ exaggerated frozen facial expressions, almost grimacing but in a funny rather than menacing way. The cohesion in its composition and the way the piece thoroughly explored its premise showed how masterful Anderson is of her craft.

Vertical Road by Akram Khan is an incredible piece of dance theatre drawing on inspiration from Sufi culture - think Islamic purification of the body, mysticism and whirling dervishes. This piece was extremely well-suited to the company as the movement language was full of strength, power and the force of gravity which matched the dancers' muscular style. The choreography interlaced many layers of complex movement patterns, intricate and rapidly-changing groupings and formations and also very strong characterisation. This piece and Anderson's Dynamo seemed to show almost a different company from the first three pieces of the evening as the performance standard and commitment to the artistic themes of the work drove the pieces, rather than the dancers moving through them while displaying their ability and facility. Like Cousins' Dark in the afternoon, the movement had a strong ritualistic, almost tribal, quality but in using the full company of dancers, Khan was able to create a whole theatrical world out of this material. We saw the dancers progress from their earthbound existences which culminated in an incredible solo by Eshe Blake-Bandele where she began to reach her ascendance towards God. The intensity with which she danced provided the most kinaesthetic experience of the evening: I can still feel the memory of the energy she transmitted to the audience as she pulsed and whirled, pounded and sweated.

I was blown away by this work and will certainly aim to see this piece and Dynamo again when Verve return to London on the 12th of June at the Linbury Studio Theatre at the ROH, as should you.