DANCE / Back to the future: Rambert Dance Company - Edinburgh Festival Theatre

Last month, Christopher Bruce, Rambert Dance Company's new artistic director, issued a press statement declaring that, 'It is imperative that we create interest and build audiences for contemporary dance.'

Was Bruce implying that contemporary dance is a virgin art form which currently generates little interest? Or that the old Rambert, under Richard Alston's artistic guidance, had few fans? Or that the new Rambert is somehow uniquely equipped to lead the way forward? And are Bruce's choreographic choices likely to attract the audiences which, he appears to believe, will justify the existence both of the company and contemporary dance itself?

Martha Clarke's The Garden of Earthly Delights and Bruce's own Sergeant Early's Dream - the two works which marked Rambert's relaunch at Edinburgh's Festival Theatre last week - exemplified the safe, middle-ground brand of modern dance that Bruce seems intent on pursuing. Both works, splendidly performed, look and feel like the memorabilia of a decade ago - which isn't really surprising, because that's exactly how old they are. Clarke's piece featured in the Edinburgh Festival some years ago; Sergeant Early's Dream dates from the early Eighties, before Alston's appointment, in 1986, and Bruce's subsequent departure from the company. Like much of his choreography at the time, this is a costume drama danced in front of Walter Nobbe's painted backcloth. The community plays out episodes of romance, bereavement, teenage waywardness and drunken camaraderie, accompanied by British, Irish and American folk-songs performed live on stage by Sergeant Early's Band.

Bruce's vocabulary, a blend of the rapid, tricksy footwork of folk-dance forms and the larger patterns of his strain of contemporary dance, is impressive. But its expressionism belongs to a period in Rambert's history better left buried. Bruce has made better works than this - as Crossing, his first for Rambert since taking over the company, demonstrates.

Crossing is a response to Gorecki's String Quartet No 2, Quasi una Fantasia.

But while it dredges deeper and more ancient levels of human behaviour than Bruce's psychological and political ballets of the Eighties, it tries too hard to convey the significance of its rites of passage. In its Stone Age primitivism, circle-dance motifs and outbreaks of bacchanalian excess, Crossing reminds you of - and makes you wish you were watching - Mark Morris's Grand Duo, a dance of similar darkness and frenzy, but one in which physical effort seems far less contrived. When, in Crossing, Ted Stoffer embarks on a brisk and sinewy solo variation, full of explosive jumps and oblique twists, his performance is undeniably impressive, but it also illustrates Bruce's reliance, in his campaign to sell dance to the masses, on body beautiful strategies and displays of virtuosity. And, like the other items on Programme 2, both Jiri Kylian's Petite Mort (in which corsetted repression quickly gives way to a collection of pseudo- erotic pas de deux to the accompaniment of movements from a couple of popular Mozart piano concertos) and Ohad Naharin's tediously derivative Axioma 7, Crossing has the desired effect.

Both Kylian and Naharin, as visiting choreographers, have given Rambert works created in 1991 for, respectively, Nederlands Dans Theater and Ballet du Grand Theatre de Geneve and both employ Rambert's versatile house orchestra, London Musici, under conductor Mark Stephenson. Although there's a generational difference between Kylian and Naharin - Israel's post-modern answer to Maurice Bejart - their choreographic vision is similar enough to induce long-term depression in anyone who believes that contemporary dance development in Britain shouldn't be umbilically linked to the accessability argument or clapometer factor. Watching the new Rambert is to experience a tug towards the past, rather than the future.

And yet, judging by the ecstatic response at Edinburgh, Bruce issues a convincing case for tip-top standards of dancing and a repertoire which pulls at the heartstrings rather than challenges the intellect. In pursuing a brand of dance based on fairly instant gratification, the tried and tested attraction of nice bodies engaged in a flurry of athletic activity, and inoffensive choreography, Bruce could be accused of trading on the nostalgia that his predecessor so vehemently rejected. But this isn't just nostalgia: Bruce is pressing ahead with strong views and a coherent policy. After the peripatetic nature of his career during the Eighties, Bruce has arrived home -to the company which he first joined in 1963 as a gifted dancer. How apt and perhaps unsurprising that the dancers of Bruce's new look Rambert are the company's finest asset.

At the Grand Theatre, Swansea, 1-5 November. Box Office 0792 475715 and touring (Photograph omitted)