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Acosta Danza: Evolution Wales Millennium Centre ★★★★I An Inspector Calls New Theatre, Cardiff ★★★★I

A QUARTET of pieces that mix genres and illuminate the joy of dance and the rhythms of life.

Acosta Danza was founded by Carlos Acosta, pictured right, in 2015 to harness and develop young dancers in Cuba.

The company’s ethos is to produce dancers who can combine classical and contemporary genres - in a question and answer session after the show, the cast talk about the magic that comes from bringing dancers trained in different styles with different ways of thinking together.

Evolution, the show the company is currently touring, is an enjoyable showcase for this combination, giving both, and other, styles moments that grab the attention.

Sundrenched opener Paysage, Soudain la nuit, brings rumba rhythms into the mix, a celebration of youth by Swedish choreographer Pontus Lidberg.

The rhythm of the music is reflected in the dancer’s movements as they take us from dawn to twilight through interwoven narratives, making connections through duets, where the piece is at its strongest, before rejoining the collective dance.

After the bright, bucolic opener, second piece Impronta opens on a stark spotlight on soloist Zeleidy Crespo. Her incredible flexibility and skill, with Maria Rovira’s choreography, make for a compelling piece full of fluidity, with Crespo’s long blue dress swirling and dancing in counterpoint.

Faun is the clearest mix of classical and contemporary, choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s interpretation of ballet L’Apres-midi d’un faune, with musician Nitin Sawhney adding to Debussy’s original score.

In a woodland setting, the piece evokes awakenings of several kinds as the dancers draw the audience into their discovery, first of self and then of each other.

Finale Rooster sees Acosta dance alongside the company in Christopher Bruce’s piece set to music by the Rolling Stones.

The exuberant entertaining piece imagines young men on a night out as strutting cockerels trying to attract the attentions of the women they meet and is the most ballet influenced with touches of jive and rock and roll.

It’s a crowd-pleasing number, helped along by touches of humour, dramatic choreography, and Acosta’s charisma, commanding the audience’s attention right to the final beat. who questions the family about the suicide of a young workingclass woman in her mid-twenties.

Long considered part of the repertory of classic drawing-room theatre, the play has also been hailed as a scathing criticism of the hypocrisies of Victorian and Edwardian English society and as an expression of Priestley’s socialist political principles.

But despite being written in the 1940s, and set in 1912, the main themes of being kind to people and how we are all part of one society resonate in today’s world.

The set, the acting and the performances were excellent, and even a 15-year-old boy who using only uses one word sentences to convey his feelings admitted he really enjoyed it.

More relevant now than ever, this is a must-see for a whole new generation of theatregoers.

An Inspector Calls runs in Cardiff until Saturday, March 14