Nederlands Dans Theater 2, Sadler's Wells, London

Young and sexy, but stuck in a loop

If I were a young dancer starting out on my career there's no question which company I'd be pestering to audition for. Nederlands Dans Theater is properly international, has a house-style much envied and copied around the world, and is unrivalled in its handling of fresh talent. Three-quarters of NDT's core performing group comes through NDT2, a squad of 17-to-22-year-olds ruthlessly selected for their physical ability and raw stage personality, and brought to performing maturity through professional exposure.

Do they look like apprentices? Does Queen Beatrix dance the can-can? NDT2 has been regularly thrilling British audiences with its annual provincial tours, and no, there's nothing probationary about them. The combination of vaunting youth and technical dazzle is potent and very sexy. Add to this the willingness of master choreographers such as Jiri Kylian and Hans Van Manen to make work specifically for NDT2, and you've got pretty much the best of everything.

At least that's how I've felt about NDT2 on past sightings. But since their initial UK tour, six years ago, new house choreographers have emerged - again, nurtured by the parent company - following closely the imprint of Kylian and Van Manen. Too closely, I'd say. For increasingly NDT2's shows are looking familiar: fabulously energetic, immaculately danced, and never less than sleekly lit and designed. Yet as the same theatrical ideas crop up - spotlit darknesses, sinister moving screens, girls with their tops off, a Babel of languages - you begin to feel trapped in an NDT loop. A youthful, sexy loop, but a loop nonetheless.

This déjà-vu was at its most pronounced in the first programme the company presented last week, despite the presence of two premieres. It's surely no coincidence that Kylian's 27'52" (the duration of the piece and its title) features a dancer being spun about on a large rubber mat, tugged by four dancers each gripping a corner, an idea also explored with a carpet in Paul Lightfoot's new piece Subject to Change. Perhaps someone decided thematic links make a tidy package. Alas, in practice, they drain impact one from another.

While there were great moments in Kylian's piece - especially a tender final duet that seemed to carry its protagonists into a kind of death-embrace - it felt over-long. The new Lightfoot offering, on the other hand, looked taut and racy, especially in its chorus line of four boys, bare-chested under their suit-jackets, whose tightly synchronised, limb-hurling moves rendered them almost outrageously alluring.

The opening piece, Dream Play, by Johan Inger, also favoured the male of the species. The first part of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (taped, of course) suggested the thematic frame, though this was ostensibly a daydream rutting fantasy of the sort that ends, "And then I woke up". Again, it was strong on inventing raunchy, swaggering, animalistic stomps for the men. I loved the way one of them shivered his spine like a stag ridding his hide of flies.

But the true original of the evening was Lightfoot's Shutters Shut, a duet danced to a reading of a typically bonkers text by Gertrude Stein. Here the dance so wittily, so aptly, and so hilariously embodies the words, that its charm rubs off on the text (and not the other way around, as you'd think). Too bad NDT2 is too democratic to name individual soloists, for the young pair in the first night cast - raising true belly laughs from the audience with their Tweedledum-Tweedledee antics - could have given a master class in timing, precision, and detail at a lick.

jenny.gilbert@independent.co.uk

Sheffield Lyceum (0114 249 6000), Tue & Wed; High Wycombe Swan (01494 512000), Fri & Sat; touring