Emanuel Gat Dance, Sadler's Wells/ Henri Oguike Dance, Touring

How do young modern choreographers engage with their audience? With references from the street - motion that the audience knows and recognises? With musical expressiveness? With the development of a technical style that has a language of its own? How about with an instinct, a yearning to entertain? Surely not!

Questions, questions, after seeing two typically talented dancemakers of 2010, an era when it’s common for audiences to be left drifting without paddles, wondering if there’s a map under the seat somewhere to help them to steer by. In other words, it’s either got too many confusing signals going on or else not enough. Henri Oguike the one, Emanuel Gat the other.

For one thing, one doesn’t need a paddle to get even extremely abstract dance when its physical style is insistently detailed and curious. Trisha Brown and Merce Cunningham, those old veterans, have just been highlighted in Dance Umbrella, both of them honing over time and inquiry a path that tells of revisiting old ideas, yes, but never standing still.

But Gat’s one-hour Winter Variations, at Sadler’s Wells last night, takes a 15-minute 2004 duet, Winter Voyage, repeats it and then expands it to an hour. You had to twig his male duet from its outset, be held for around 60 minutes, while the two men pattered around an empty black stage in sickly white light, doing a restlessly synchronised duo that owes most of its style to a lithe but subdued street movement, ratcheted up a few notches.

Watch a section of Winter Variations:

Vernacular casual movement can be surprising and gripping (thinking of Yvonne Rainer and Dana Reitz, two of the Sixties anti-dance postmodernists). I’ve been electrified by the emotive force of Gat’s compatriot Hofesh Shechter, who draws on a very similar kind of street movement in his recent Political Mother, though with vastly more theatrical shock value. I could surrender very swiftly to anything that fields on the soundtrack Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert’s Winterreise or Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in that beautifully disconnected way of his, as if he's marvelling at his ability to feel, rather than (as with other singers) drawing us helplessly into his pain. I was very happy to make a first acquaintance of the Egyptian Riad al Sunbati’s honeyed singing here.

But the choreography, the dance, this is the problem. We have come to the theatre, begging to be surprised, held, touched. My initial light interest in the repetitious, mildly melancholy nature of Gat and Roy Assaf’s duet faded away, so many steps, as if the men needed to keep exercised. If there was an internal narrative to impart, I didn't latch on. Tumbles, rolls, folkdance, the motion patters on, elbows rough and tough, laddish hopping jumps and little jiving twirls. There are what appear to be peaceable Arabic references: the song is untranslated but long and lyrically touching, the men walk about on their knees, which may or may not be a reference to hajj. Glancing reflections, nothing properly to attract the eye or mind’s eye, and coupling this with the inert dullness of his work the other week for CandoCo, the disabled/able-bodied dance company currently going through a deeply uninteresting phase, I shan’t be rushing to go see the Gat oeuvre again.

Whereas I’ve long made detours to follow the emerging and vital talent of Henri Oguike, the Port Talbot Nigerian boy who burst like a firework onto the stage a decade or so ago, bringing a very rare combination of direct, unpretentiously passionate musicality with an instinctive sensuality in his movement, shades of The Place, Welsh streets and Africa mixed up and shaken together, lit with great flair and usually served up with fine live music.

Oguike isn’t one to recycle a 2004 duet into an hour’s solemn expansion; his way is to make three new pieces a year for a truly mixed bill. Pity that a long drive up to Cambridge to see the opening of his new Butterfly Dreaming bill for 2010-11 wasn’t rewarded as expected.

Last year he put his company into abeyance, for a rethink. The last piece of his I saw was at Rambert a year ago, a strong and characteristically individual Schubert work, Tread Softly. This bill for his reformed group feels thinner in voice, with some uncertainties and some awkwardness. It’s hampered by the irresolute feel of the title item, Butterfly Dreaming, which uses a forest of dim lightbulbs and Tan Dun’s spooky-witchy string piece Ghost Opera as if it wants to be a Hallowe’en cult creation, but then bottles it and descends into silliness. If you’re going to ask your dancers to yelp and howl while prowling the stage, dish it up with rich bad taste and atmosphere, do, or we’ll just sit there feeling uncomfortable. (Or possibly stand back and reconsider it somewhat.)

Another miscalculation flaws the flow of the bill from the start. Freq is an attractive, hauntingly lit solo for an unearthly apparition under a shower of water, some of the effects almost hologrammatic (lighting by Yaron Abulafia), accompanied delicately by the Erik Satie Gnossiennes lusciously recorded by Anne Queffélec. But it is at least one Gnossienne too long and leaves a big technical clear-up after it that necessitates an interval when you’ve barely got into the swing. (Above, Fukiko Takase in Freq pictured by Henri Oguike.)

The second, Point of Contact (a spiritless title), is a quartet for man and three women that has more of the Oguike vitality to it, a sexy romp for sardonic, laconic dancers in disconcertingly cute little ruffled playsuits (for boys as well as girls). The focus is on a combination of man and three women which is always intriguing (The Judgement of Paris, Apollo and the Muses), and it fits the subversive energy of his women as they challenge the guy for equality, while still evidently having dreams about him.

But why has Oguike, long a champion of the unexpected in music, picked on two such familiar pieces? Satie’s Gnossiennes do suit the solo (a finely etched piece of dancing by the androgynous Fukiko Takase) but the Bach has a sobriety not offering much to the sauciness of Point of Contact. Oguike's flame splutters a bit with this bill as it is, but the tour should sort some of this out.

• Emanuel Gat Dance perform Winter Variations again tonight at Sadler's Wells
• Henri Oguike Dance tours to Brighton Corn Exchange (9 Nov), Bath University (13 Nov), then from 4 February-15 March to Bury St Edmunds, Malvern, Nottingham, Ilfracombe, London's Linbury Studio Theatre (8 & 9 Mar) and Guildford. Details on the company website
• See what's on at Sadler's Wells in 2010-11