This tour, taking in Wolverhampton Grand Theatre, marks the first time the Brazilian São Paulo Dance Company - founded in 2008 - has come to the UK. And now we know what we’ve been missing.

In a triple-bill programme which is both frenetically energy-packed but also quietly contemplative, the company’s dancers excel with a blend of balance, strength and agility.

The three pieces have a running theme that celebrates the links that bind us, but there is also a more sorrowful and even sinister note when they explore what happens when we repudiate that common humanity - isolating and even enslaving those we deem as ‘others’.

The evening opens with Goyo Montero’s Anthem, which delves into how shared music can unite people. With a score by Owen Belton, it stresses the power of those consolidating anthems as we see the group join in tribal movements, all perfectly attuned.

And when members of that group break away, we witness how it can be both liberating but also lonely to be outside of the herd.

Nacho Duato’s Gnawa is a hauntingly beautiful evocation of the Gnawa people, who were brought from the Sahel to Morocco as slaves. The soundtrack, written by seven composers, recalls the intangible essence of North African music, so gentle and yet with a deeper rhythm which recalls the huge emptiness of the Sahara. The dancing here reflects this music, with duets and corps dances being both sinuously tender and yet dependent on a solid inner strength for the movements to look so subtle.

Finally Cassi Abranches’ Agora is a high-octane explosion of dance which features some impressive lifts and jumps - all performed to perfection. A celebration of life, it is set to a percussive and vocal score by Sebastian Piracés. Agora begins with each dancer swaying side to side to a ticking metronome and then breaks out into a glorious and heady rush of dance, each movement piling on top of the next, in a non-stop frenetic whirlwind before the dancers return to that ticking uniformity.

The performances mark the advent of Wolverhampton Grand Theatre as a member of Dance Consortium, a group of venues across Britain & Ireland which together bring leading international contemporary dance to local audiences.

It is an exciting step for the Grand, and with Dance Consortium having toured so many brilliant companies in the past, we can hopefully look forward to plenty more innovative and interesting dance on the Wolverhampton stage in the future. 

Four stars

Reviewed by Diane Parkes at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre on Friday 15 March.