The drama in dance: Faye Driscoll and Trisha Brown

You probably haven't heard of Faye Driscoll, but if experimental dance theatre ever emerges from oblivion, you will. Since the birth of the Greek chorus and the Dionysian rite, dance has been linked with ecstatic states. The 34-year-old LA transplant unites them again, but not for the usual reason of delivering a sexy number. Instead, her giddily gruesome comedy There is so much mad in me reveals what communal forms of extreme feeling leave in the dust - mauled and pummelled - as they ruthlessly pursue their ends.

Amanda Ringger's lighting veers from glowing puddles in the dark to blinding brightness. Brandon Wolcott's soundscape slips from thundery rumbles to hollow New Wave beats to silence. Meanwhile, a ménage à trois re-forms as a twosome plus taskmaster, or the anarchic play of all nine dancers turns vicious and mob-like before it mutates into an oddly askew aerobics routine.

The most consistent pleasures that Trisha Brown offers are not dramatic, musical or visual but kinetic. She reveals the muscle and momentum that drives a step so that we sense what it might feel like to execute the move. The 73-year-old choreographer makes dancers of us.

The company's year-long 40th anniversary celebration, which extends from the US to Europe, began on Wednesday with Leah Morrison turning her back on us.

In If you couldn't see me the dancer never does show her face, but we can see her - or at least the part of her that matters to Brown. Morrison complements a swing of her leg with an undulating shoulder. She descends suddenly into a deep plié. She lets an animal stillness overtake her as she extends an arm upward at a slant as if signaling a thought. Last year Morrison won a Bessie - New York dance's Oscars - for her performance of this 1994 solo, and it is clear why. She brings out the delicacy and fullness of Brown's approach, in which everything counts as a detail and nothing does.

The 1980 Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503, the only other piece on this appetiser of a programme, begins with prancy feet - imagine reined-in horses - and anxious, air-massaging hands. As sculptor Fujiko Nakaya's fog waterfall rolls down the theatre's back and gradually floods the stage, the four dancers iron out their limbs and move with full-bodied clarity among the clouds.

Even with all their bodily fullness, however, these works do not let me forget what they omit. Of the two pieces....

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