The Match, Purcell Room, South Bank, London

Deborah Hay's The Match starts out as postmodern dance minimalism. Four dancers patter through repeated phrases; the steps light, unweighted, tidy. Then the repetitions pick up twitches of enthusiasm or embarrassment, gradually turning into jokes.

Deborah Hay's The Match starts out as postmodern dance minimalism. Four dancers patter through repeated phrases; the steps light, unweighted, tidy. Then the repetitions pick up twitches of enthusiasm or embarrassment, gradually turning into jokes.

Hay is one of the Judson choreographers, a group of radical 1960s artists that included Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs. They asked what dance was, using non-professional performers, everyday movement and blank repetition.

Hay strews her programme notes with indigestible theory, but the performance is much livelier. As Wally Cardona dances, he starts to strike attitudes. The repeated steps have a would-be cool swagger, constantly sliding into goofiness. Chrysa Parkinson, in blouse and pleated skirt, has a gawky suggestion of Joyce Grenfell in schoolmistress mode. She's dishevelled, and she prowls about like an Edward Gorey cartoon.

The dancers perform in unison, then break up for individual solos. All four performers will suddenly switch around, staring offstage, before pottering back to their dance. Sometimes they purr and growl, muttering nonsense.

Like Matthew Bourne, Hay is interested in the body language of embarrassment. There's an element of caricature in these dances. Some steps become comic through exaggeration. Elsewhere, these dancers look carried away by their odd steps. Crawling on hands and knees, they plod very carefully.

The Match goes beyond self-consciousness in a solo for Mark Lorimer. He repeats the same sequence - chanting - seeming to rack his brains for a new variation, and he's openly delighted when he finds one. Meanwhile, the repeats get sillier and sillier.

Repetition is still a high-risk strategy. The Match comes with extra solos: dances based on material from the main dance. Ros Warby is the neatest of these four dancers, with tidily elegant line. Her primness works well against the looser styles of her colleagues, but it doesn't sustain a 25-minute solo. Parkinson's solo has more bite. Her stamina is astonishing, and she weights those steps with ferocious dedication.