The Critics: Dance: Crash! Bang! Splat! It's Stomp!

Stomp The Roundhouse, NW1 La Cuadra de Sevilla: 'Carmen' Sadler's Wells, EC1

Those of us who have trouble clapping along with "Kumbayah" tend to view the complicated, playful rhythms swapped back and forth by the eight dancer-drummers of Stomp with something approaching awe. Thrashing away on brushes, brooms, dustbins, boxes, wheels, and anything else that comes to hand - including the other hand - they generate a sound that is both fierce and intricate, as if someone had tied Fred Astaire to the front of an oncoming train. Although the quieter moments are beguiling - such as a matchbox trio between three men, break-dancing to their own whispering backbeat - it's when they cut loose that Stomp bring the house down.

Somehow, they manage to beat an Apocalypse Now's-worth of bangs and whistles, sniper-rustlings, rain-forest chirrupings, and whirrs from the contents of a small municipal dump. They may be the first people since Hong Kong Phooey to convince the middle classes that there is something primal and dangerous about being a janitor. All the noise and violence are good-natured, though. Stomp are playful, and play it for laughs, often revolving around the designated clown, David Olrod, and his wistful attempts to impress by playing a hand-held paint-scraper xylophone, or beating a small tattoo with a yellow pencil on his round, shiny spectacles.

Stomp routines often begin with someone picking up an object and casually discovering what sound they can get out of it. The metamorphoses are often startling. One number begins with three men hanging kitchen sinks around their necks as drums, donning rubber gloves and coming on like an Orange march for henpecked husbands. But within seconds they are squeaking the gloves across the wet metalwork surfaces, turning themselves into DJs, scratching at their decks. Then there is the obligatory steel band, a BBC Radiophonic Workshop effect produced by tapping on the bottom of a steel mug as they empty it of water, indulge in some splashing tantrums, and - to finish off - do a neat impression of what Frank L Baum's Tin Man would look like pissing in a bucket. Stomp aren't just about crushing dustbins - although a lot of that does go on. There is sophistication here, and energy and wit.

La Cuadra de Sevilla also have energy to spare - but little patience for irony. For their version of Carmen they keep only a handful of pre- recorded tunes from Bizet's opera, and reach back to an older, more raw and blood-steeped tradition. The music is mostly provided by three singers, two guitarists and a permanently on-stage band of buglers and drummers. Bugles are primitive instruments, always played on the edge of failure, speaking of pain and sending shivers through the backbone, as if someone had distilled a brassy, improbable beauty from the squeals of the slaughterhouse. They fit this Carmen perfectly.

The musicians and singers ring the edge of the stage, as if for a seance. Carmen and Don Jose aren't so much accompanied by the music as invoked by it, forced to re-enact the legend of their lives. The intensity and starkness of the performance - the mixture of blood and fate - recalls those village festivals where the Crucifixion is performed each year with different volunteers, real nails and a makeshift cross.

This Carmen betrays Don Jose with a Picador, and famously dances a duet with her lover while he is mounted on his horse. The animal is a white stallion, trained at the Spanish Riding School of Vienna, and dwarfs everything else on stage. At one point, Lalo Tejada, as Carmen, grasps its forelock as it prances round her in a tight circle. The fusion of so much power, grace and danger crushes the distance between spectator and participant, forcing the onlooker's body into a ghostly muscular response, a visceral awareness of how exultant it must feel, for that moment, to stand in Carmen's place.

Stomp: Roundhouse, NW1 (0171 420 0171), to 27 December.

Jenny Gilbert returns next week.