Let it never be said that Britain’s oldest dance company doesn’t know how to shake things up. Exhibit A: Rambert’s new spin-off youth company, Rambert2, the 13-strong ensemble blazing new trails with their intensely physical debut tour.

And if this inaugural triple bill is anything to go by the edgy new troupe is going places.

Slow at first but building to an erratic and truly hypnotic climax, Benoit Swan Pouffer’s Grey Matter, a powerful new work about the fleeting nature of memory and the mind’s inevitable decline, sets the tone, showcasing the dancers’ impressive control, precision – and versatility.

Faye Stoeser’s convulsive solo as she steadily loses her grip on reality, writhing, flailing, spinning to the heavy pulse of the relentless score is hugely affecting.

Dramatically lit and scored by fractious overlapping voices, Rafael Bonachela’s enigmatic duet E2 7SD notches up the already knife-edge tension. Veering between intimacy and all-out antagonism, the volatile pair embrace, caress, kick and tussle to the point of exhaustion.

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Shoehorned into Rambert2’s debut tour, Christopher Bruce’s Ghost Dances, performed by the Rambert Company proper, shifts to a more measured tempo and offers much-needed relief from the triple bill’s frenetic tempo.

To the chilling sound of the howling wind ghoulish death figures engage in a ritualistic and macabre dance, gradually insinuating themselves in and interfering with a group of ordinary men and women – the grim personification of political oppression in South America.

Completing the set, Sharon Eyal’s intriguingly-titled Killer Pig throws the audience for a loop. Manic, uncompromisingly physical (as the brief summary so perfectly puts it), deceptively simple and defiantly cool – few choreographers would dare feature pigeon-style head-bobbing – the piece sees dancers strut like a flock of birds in a strange mating ritual.

As Killer Pig hits its jacked-up groove, the choreography takes on a more animalistic and nightmare edge, spiralling to a nerve-racking finale.

Simply exhilarating. - Marion Sauvebois

Rambert’s new spin-off youth company, Rambert2 at the Theatre Royal in Bath until tomorrow