A triptych of performances from the Rambert Contemporary Dance Company last night left the audience provoked, enriched and stunned by turns.

The old school setting of Brighton’s Theatre Royal seemed apt when juxtaposed with the stark striations of the lighting and stage design, echoing the perpetual torment of the dancers reaching for the unattainable and discovering horror in desire.

The second piece, Transfigured Night, featured a duet in which Brighton-born Liam Francis and his partner Lucy Balfour managed feats of spellbinding weightlessness that seemed to contest physics, with enormous restraint and dissention.

Dancing with a fragility belying an exquisite power, Simone Damburg Würtz took leading roles in two sequences.

The title piece, The 3 Dancers (an interpretation of Picasso’s painting of the same name), choreographed by award-winning Didy Veldman saw Damburg Würtz at her most striking and expressive, cutting a Dietrich-esque figure within a painful dance of sex, death and hopelessness.

The mathematical prowess involved in choreography of this standard seemed reality-defying.

The absolute, unwavering faith the dancers placed in one another to achieve the contortions they did, sublime. When richly combined with an orchestra possessed of utter precision as it was, the final result? Awesome.

Five Stars