On Their Toes!, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Birmingham Hippodrome

Hans van Manen does basic instincts in ballet better than anyone alive. The Dutch choreographer, nearly 78 and far too little exposed in Britain, is a near-contemporary of Kenneth MacMillan, another specialist in sexual relations, but where MacMillan is fascinatingly drenched in guilt, Van Manen takes a bold, guilt-free stand. Grosse Fuge, which Birmingham Royal Ballet revived in the Hippodrome last night in a smart triple bill to entertain all tastes, is all about mating display - four men in black oriental skirts and big-buckled belts, four women in beige Playtex-type corsets that give them mumsy boobs and look unusually sexy.

Pity what happens to its music, though. One of Beethoven’s austerest and most remote string quartets, the one-movement Opus 133 Grosse Fuge is harnessed to the sublime Cavatina from the Opus 130 quartet which the Grosse Fuge was originally intended to finish. To me this cerebral, spellbinding music has nothing even faintly about sexual attraction in it. Evidently it does to Van Manen, since he picked the saturated orchestration made by Felix Weingartner a century ago which lathers on a gamey, Schoenbergian flavour. This muddies the phenomenal clarity and boldness of the original four bare string parts and was dully played last night by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia under Philip Ellis (mostly, I blame Weingartner for messing with the music).

But the choreography is strong, eyecatching and individual, with long purposeful lines of leg, intriguingly torqued holds and powerful eye contact between the four couples, and some cute little motifs, like the places where men and women spring up and down on the spot on alternate beats, almost like piano keys going up and down.

A piece like this demands the assertive sexual confidence inbred in Netherlands Dance Theatre, where this was created in 1971. BRB’s team are gentler folk. The four guys looked slightly worried in the biceps-flexing and samurai posturing, rather than proud sexual warriors ready to drag their women home to the campfire. Still, the blonde young Dusty Button from America understands how to unleash her limbs in a flash of movement that is hair-raisingly exciting to see, and she sure can glower (see main picture).

An extract from 'Grosse Fuge' opens this short Van Manen medley:

Button’s lack of inhibition in her shoulders and through-the-body swing caught the eye even in the corps de ballet of the classical sweetmeat of ballerina aristocracy that is George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations. The audience gasped (it always does) when the curtain rose on Tchaikovsky and a frozen tableau of ice-blue princesses in tiaras and tutus, saluting us in a chandeliered hall. The picture is iconic ballet theatre, almost a suit of Russian ballet playing cards, with the King and Queen at the front in white, everything glistening. Then gently but firmly they set out simple themes of music and ballet, first her, then him, and then the almost equally absorbing 12 corps girls, all of them (one hopes to see) picking up their toes as if they were darting across the thinnest ice.

That kind of daintiness we didn’t get last night - Nao Sakuma and Chi Cao led a show that looked like a working exercise, not like a fantasy they were inviting us into. Cao in particular failed to school his face in the demeanour of a man in white prince gear - he wore a street face at all times, concentrating fiercely on his pirouettes, and took little care to float and shape his arms in aristocratic amplitude. Sakuma did a little better in that department, flashing a few majestic smiles, but she is too centred and contained dancer, and too cautious in her stepwork, to suggest the 1947 technical dazzle and radiant mystique that the original ballerina, Alicia Alonso, must have delivered in spades. Mystique, like Van Manen, is too much underrated.

Anywhere from the palace to the gutter Balanchine demands mystique in a girl. He's not as interested in sex as Van Manen. In his early ballet for the 1936 musical On Your Toes, a gangster skit called Slaughter on Tenth Avenue that ended last night's bill, an innocent guy gets entangled with the usual mysterious dame, and she better be alluring or the high-split kicks will just look vulgar. BRB’s Céline Gittens, apart from having a perfect name for a sex kitten, was the perfect, slinky Striptease Girl who lassos Robert Parker in his night on the town. (Parker and Gittens pictured right by Bill Cooper/BRB)

It’s a torn fishnets kind of place, designed with a nod to New Yorker cartoons by Kate Ford, a little too childishly to suit the cheap, edgy Thirties and Richard Rodgers’ all-knowing music. Still, no one does nice-but-sexy more handsomely than Parker, tapdancing for his life to stave off a gangster’s bullet, and Paul Murphy and the orchestra slurped up those slinky woodwind tunes whenever the gorgeous Gittens prowled on like a new-era Eartha Kitt.

This flavoursome programme is on all too briefly - switch off the football one night between now and Saturday.

• Birmingham Royal Ballet perform the On Their Toes! triple bill at the Birmingham Hippodrome today (matinee and evening), tomorrow and Saturday (matinee and evening: next week Swan Lake Tuesday to Saturday.

Watch Gene Kelly and Vera-Ellen in the 'Slaughter on Tenth Avenue' ballet from the film 'Words and Music' 1948: