TAKE eight young contemporary dancers - all making the crossover from final-year training into professional performance - and you have Transitions Dance Company, founded by Bonnie Bird in 1982 as a way of ensuring that students at the Laban Centre garnered some realistic on-the-road experience as a preparation for the working life ahead.
It was a positive, practical action - so let's not brood over the number of unemployed dancers who take to teaching, or working in shops . . . It was also part of her plan that the dancers should have the chance to work, closely, with a variety of interesting, highly individualistic choreographers.
This particular programme set the group some decidedly tough challenges: they need to pull out sudden speed and crispness of detail for Amanda Miller's An Etude, with its clever resonances of atomic structure, fusion, and fission, and yet be capable of maintaining sculptural stillness, balance, and an easy athleticism for Allen Kaeja's Permafrost, a somewhat over-emphatic portrayal of human isolation and the need for contact.
Rosemary Lee took an altogether more robust and witty approach to the quest for intimacy in her 3 Studies in Courtship, in which elements of social dancing - from stately period piece to ceilidh jig-and-fling - were crossed with animal mating patterns to produce a slow, snakelike seduction, a skittish chase, and, quite hilariously, a tussling couple who locked antler-arms like rutting deer. Like Israeli choreographer Noa Dar's deliciously bizarre Fhou - in which oranges (presumably Jaffa) seemed able to liberate the spirit and free up robotic limbs - Lee's work was rich in inventive detail, rhythmic shifts and layers of possible meaning.
I'm sure Jamie Watton intended to be teasing and enigmatic with Helalisa, an audience/performer who's-watching-whom conundrum that was a tad over-stretched. But again, the dancers tackled it with willing enthusiasm though, in truth, they looked most at home in the fast, tricksy whimsies of Dar.
Good, however, to see so many new faces and new works coming together in what was, overall, an attractive programme.
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