La Traviata, Cardiff New Theatre, Cardiff

Torsos like tagliatelle? Pecs like pecorino? That's Italian-flavoured movement!

Now that Sadler's Wells is functioning full tilt as an international dance house, it's harder for lesser known companies to sell their pitch. Aterballetto, we're told, Italy's premier contemporary dance group making its first UK visit, has "something uniquely Italian about it", which set me wondering how that characteristic could possibly apply to dance. Italian opera and ice cream, certainly, sleek modern furniture, maybe. But Italian-flavoured movement? Even in context, it's a stretch.

Now that Sadler's Wells is functioning full tilt as an international dance house, it's harder for lesser known companies to sell their pitch. Aterballetto, we're told, Italy's premier contemporary dance group making its first UK visit, has "something uniquely Italian about it", which set me wondering how that characteristic could possibly apply to dance. Italian opera and ice cream, certainly, sleek modern furniture, maybe. But Italian-flavoured movement? Even in context, it's a stretch.

Ten years ago, English National Ballet commissioned a couple of pieces from Mauro Bigonzetti, now Aterballetto's director and choreographer. Sleek and glossy, his work seemed the epitome of pan-European chic. But something has happened to Bigonzetti in the interim - a drastic loosening of form and a sharpening of local colour. In Cantata, his 2001 setting of traditional Neapolitan songs, you not only hear and see the seethe of southern Italian street life, you almost smell it, right down to the pizza effluent in the gutters.

This is not the Italy of the tourist trail but a rough, sweaty place poised at the brink of brawling chaos. The tone is set by an on-stage quartet, Gruppo Musicale Assurd, a bunch of tank-chested, thick-armed women whose klaxon voices range between bass and tenor and whose wrist action with a tambourine hints at the damage they could inflict on a wayward husband.

As the singers wander about bellowing their dialect songs about betrayal and poverty, Aterballetto's 18 dancers bunch and surge in scruffy, scrambling heaps. Dejected and defiant by turns, they fling out limbs and shake manes of hair and ripple torsos as if they were tagliatelle. A programme note reveals that some of these dances are based on the tarantella, the 17th-century folk dance evolved from the jitters that followed a tarantula bite. But as each song lurches into the next and energy levels reach a point of near-abandon, it's useless trying to distinguish sources. An improvised encore, not unlike the closing fiesta frolics in flamenco but obviously not faked, left the first-night audience on a spirited high.

Which is just as well since the earlier Les Noces, updating Nijinska's modernist classic, fell flat. Italy has the lowest birth rate in Europe, and Bigonzetti wanted to re-examine the marriage rite in the light of modern expectations. But for all the ferocious style with which he pits his men and women against each other - segregated on opposite sides of the stage, rocking noisily on chrome frames resembling prayer stools, and coming together only for grappling, doomed duets - he lacks the broader vision of Nijinska. By the end, unenlightened, we are left pondering the single best idea of the evening, as the upturned metal frames swing randomly like church bells, echoing the solemn, tolling close of Stravinsky's score.

Recycling plots is a speciality of Northern Ballet Theatre, which has earned itself a strong national following by cornering the market in narrative. Audiences like stories they can hum, and there is nothing inherently wrong in turning, say, Verdi's La Traviata into a ballet, so long as there is an understanding that it's more than a question of simply sucking out the vocal line and passing it to a clarinet, while the dancers act out what happens in the opera.

Unhappily this is the case with Veronica Paeper's Traviata, originally made for a company in Cape Town and added to NBT's roster this season. Lack of clarity isn't the issue - there's never the slightest doubt over what any of its characters is doing or thinking. But the reduction of a seminal work of a great composer into a shabby equation of tunes, exits and entrances is dismaying, not least because it pays so little heed to the centrality of vocal sound and presence in opera, and the true potential of dramatic dance.

That said, the production is beautifully designed and costumed (Peter Cazalet), and deftly if facilely choreographed by Paeper, with remarkably little padding. And the performers act their socks off, not least Keiko Amemori's delicate little Marguerite, whose paroxysms of crying and fist-drumming are keenly felt. The real tragedy is the dancers': that they think this is all ballet can do.

'La Traviata': Cardiff New Theatre (029 2087 8889), 24-28 May

jenny.gilbert@independent.co.uk