The two new works that Candoco will be touring until March 2009 plainly challenge and excite the company's seven disabled and non-disabled dancers. Hofesh Shechter's The Perfect Human, a soberly ironic consideration of the illusory search for physical perfection, plays like a dynamic first draft for a more fully developed future piece. In contrast, Nigel Charnock's episodic Still needed less anarchic theatricality and irreverent humour to convey its big themes (sex, love, death). Yet, despite their shortcomings, these ensemble dances are effectively linked by an at times obsessive focus on what the human body can (or cannot) do, and what it represents.

Shechter's cast operates like a pack of thieves, frequently donning eerie white masks. The distinguishing features of his sneaky, compressed movement language are all here - trembling jerks and undulations, fidgety feet, bodies hunkered down and sliding close to the floor. Chris Owen, with his stringbean frame, is a particularly articulate exponent of the choreographer's trademark concave crouch. Occasionally he and the others herd together and make rhythmic gestures, as if in the temporary grip of some primal folk boogie. Anchored by Shechter's own percussive music, which blends in baroque strings, the underlying mood is of a furtive, harried and haunted quest. Only Annie Hanauer, in a superbly expansive solo, briefly breaks free of the skulking restlessness.

As a performer, Charnock thrives on risky exposure and excess, qualities that Candoco's game dancers hungrily embrace on his behalf in Still. Owen and Darren Anderson grapple with combative intimacy. Four women armed with music boxes go through the motions of mechanical romance. Exhibitionist impulses spill out into the audience.

Driven by an eclectic soundtrack that shifts from the heavy-metal assault of Agoraphobic Nosebleed to Somethin' Stupid, the entire company negotiates Charnock's camp comedy, half-baked chaos and overfamiliar dance-theatre tropes with a go-for-broke urgency. It suggests that Still may be more than the sum of its parts.

Next at Louth Riverhead Theatre on Nov 22.

Box office: 01507 600350. www.candoco.co.uk

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