Spring Loaded At The Place

Since the season's launch in 1987, this investment has spawned many 'household names' - Matthew Bourne, Wayne McGregor, Lloyd Newson, Shobana Jeyasingh, Lea Anderson and Russell Maliphant all presented some of their earliest works in Spring Loaded.

Spring Loaded begins with Probe. Antonia Grove and Theo Clinkard, whose collective CV includes work with Random, Rambert, Bonachela Dance Company, The Featherstonehaughs, Siobhan Davies and Adventures in Motion Pictures, present an ambitious programme that includes five duets and two solos by seven different choreographers in Magpie (Thu 27 - Sat 29 Mar). Four specially commissioned duets - from dark dramatist Mark Bruce, the sublimely understated Charles Linehan, Broadway darling Stephen Mear and the brilliantly absurd New Art Club - sit alongside Trisha Brown's seminal Accumulation from 1971, Jeremy James' first-ever piece Scag and a Bessie award-winning work from Israeli choreographer Yasmeen Godder.

Created by Lost Dog's Ben Duke and Raquel Meseguer, Hungry Ghosts (Tue 1 & Wed 2 Apr) was the 2007 Robin Howard Foundation commission for Spring Loaded. It is a physical and challenging piece of dance theatre exploring the loss and guilt survivors of random acts of terrorism experience.

Inspired by the poem of the same name by Joseph Mancure March, Rosie Kay Dance Company's The Wild Party (Fri 4 & Sat 5 Apr) captures all the energy, debauchery and sleaze of the jazz age set in the present day. A piece for four dancers, set to jazz music played live by a three-piece band, The Wild Party was created by choreographer and performer Kay in collaboration with dramaturg Ben Payne and composer Hans Koller.

StopGAP, the only professional company in the UK to work with dancers with both physical and learning disabilities as well as able-bodied dancers, visits The Place on its first-ever national tour. Portfolio Collection (Tue 8 & Wed 9 Apr) features six new works - commissions by Hofesh Shechter, Natalie Pernette, Gary Clarke and Rob Tannion, plus pieces by company members Lucy Bennett, Chris Pavia and Dan Watson -that are a mix of pure dance and theatre characterised by strong technique and a mischievous sense of humour.

In Srishti's Play Ball (Fri 11 & Sat 12 Apr) an international cast led by choreographer Nina Rajarani celebrates being macho through playing football, talking big bucks and succumbing to love. The triple bill of short pieces includes Bend It, an unlikely union of Bharatanatyam and football, with musicians and dancers tackling, shooting, celebrating and faking injury. Chemistry shows a softer side to the male ego in a duet about one man's attempts to woo back his girlfriend after an argument. Quick, Rajarani's 2006 Place Prize winning work, is set in London's cut-throat business world.

Sense of Self (Tue 15 & Wed 16 Apr) is a duet created and performed by Bristol-based Laila Diallo and Canadian dancer/choreographer Melanie Demers (formerly of O Vertigo). With music by Jacques Poulin-Denis, the piece was created between Kenya, Canada and the UK and examines questions about identity and redefinition.

Frauke Requardt's Roadkill Cafe (Fri 18 & Sat 19 Apr) is a darkly humorous, surreal piece of mimicry and mayhem, seduction, shock and superbly choreographed fantasies. Set to a jazz score, the piece features a myriad of quirky characters, including a ukulele man and his cowboy sister and twins who swing in, play out psycho-sexual drama and disappear.

Robin Dingemans and Joanne Fong join forces for the world premiere of Me + You = 5 (Fri 25 & Sat 26 Apr), commissioned for Spring Loaded by the Moose Foundation for the Arts. Incorporating dance, physical theatre and video, Me + You = 5 reveals how we engage with the real and imagined worlds we find ourselves in.

Tom Dale Company's RISE (Mon 28 Apr) is set within an experimental and innovative sonic world of edgy drum and bass and starkly minimal melodies. The performers uncover new dance forms and strange relationships in this hypnotic new piece created with musical collaborators Jow_FishY and Cassetteboy.

Part performance, part social experiment, the darkly humorous To Die For (Tue 29 Apr) features four dancers in a gladiatorial battle to define winners and losers, where a diabolical ringmaster leads her victims through a series of fast-paced playground games. Created by Hanna Gilgren and Heidi Rustgaard of h2dance, To Die For provokes questions about brainwashing and asks how far we will go to feel like we really belong.

5 Men Dancing (Fri 2 & Sat 3 May) have a fierce commitment to pure improvisation without script or structure, thus each performance is created out of the events, ideas, accidents and occurrences of the particular evening. The 5 Men - Jordi Cortes, Rick Nodine, Adam Benjamin, Thomas Mettler and Christian Panouillot, plus friends on occasion - maintain an openness to emotional risk rarely seen on stage.

Zoi Dimitriou was awarded the 2008 Robin Howard Foundation Commission to create her new work Goddesses in Exile (Tue 6 & Wed 7 May). A duet for Dimitriou and Juliette Barton, the piece draws on myth and contemporary fiction to question femininity and the divine. Dimitriou's solo Dromi, created for The Place's 2007 Touch Wood season, is strongly influenced by Greek musical modes and philosophy and tells the story of a loner driven to protest against any form of repression.

Ben Wright's bgroup, a new ensemble of five dancers including Neb Abbot, Robert Clark, Delphine Gaborit, Keir Patrick and Matthew Winston, presents a programme of three works entitled The diminishing present (Fri 9 & Sat 10 May). Thought Latching onto Thought and Pulling, originally commissioned for The Place Prize in 2006, is a quartet for men, set to a score by Tim Sutton. The programme also features a duet Passing, Strange and Wonderful and a new quintet us.

Different notions of nationality and duty are examined in a triple bill of works about Britishness (Tue 13 May). In Rashpal Singh Bansal's Anything...but exotic, three Bharatanatyam dancers perform classical Indian choreography as an impassioned challenge to the mainstream perception of British Asian Dance. Gary Clarke's COAL explores the dark underbelly of the mining industry as five miners hack their way through a soundscape of brass bands and thunderous machinery in a moving demonstration of unity and survival. National Dance Award nominee Sally Marie's Sweetshop Revolution presents an excerpt from Dulce et Decorum in which three lost wartime Samaritans long to escape their civic lives in a land of hope without glory.

A second triple bill (Thu 15 May) examines the male presence. Joyride is a new solo by Colin Poole that strips down theatre to its bare elements of body, speech and movement and questions the audience's notions of freedom and liberty. Beth Cassani's 13 is performed by her two teenage sons. Part double act, part sibling rivalry, the brothers practice their masculinity and consider what it means to become a man in the 21st century. Set against the backdrop of Ireland's iconic Croke Park Stadium, Fearghus O'Conchuir's Match is a contest where one man emerges stronger and survives longer than the other.

A quadruple bill of work (Sat 17 May) concludes the Spring Loaded season. Rick Nodine's Come to Mamma manipulates the intense physical states of its two riotously physical and vocal women, posing questions about the representation of strong emotion on stage. Inspired by the red lines of a cityscape, urban signage and car headlights, Neon Dream is a contemporary kathak solo choreographed by Shobana Jeyasingh for Sonia Sabri. Mark Bruce's Green Apples is a visceral duet performed by Darren Ellis and Pari Naderi, set to music by The White Stripes. Revived for Spring Loaded following an eye-catching debut in this year's Resolution!, Saiko Kino's The Three Cornered World is a body-focussed work inspired by Glenn Gould and his favourite book by author Soseki Natsume. -- www.theplace.org.uk