Dance Theater of Harlem, Sadler's Wells, London

The shoes – they're what you notice first with Dance Theater of Harlem: the individually dyed satin toe-shoes. As the women, one by one, thread onto the stage from the wings in their opening number, you find yourself mentally checking through the spectrum of flesh tones on their feet. From paleish pink to deep mahogany, every possible skin colour is there.

It would be tidier, and more sound-bite-friendly, if Dance Theater of Harlem were a uniformly black ballet troupe. It might suit some people better if it expressed "the African-American experience" as the Alvin Ailey company aims to do. But ever since 1971, when the iconic ex-New York City Ballet star Arthur Mitchell felt driven by the death of Martin Luther King to found a ballet school in the deprived neighbourhood where he grew up, DTH has refused to be defined by colour. What is obvious from the repertoire it chose to bring for its first London visit in 15 years, is that it wants to be seen as mainstream.

Robert Garland's New Bach, opening the first of two programmes at Sadler's Wells, unambiguously sets out the company's stall. While the work's formal patterns hark back to the courtly European origins of Bach's music (the A minor Violin Concerto, elegantly played by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia but most inelegantly amplified), the finer detail nods to urban America. Hence long diagonals of conventional turns and balances are peppered with disco flavourings: a sly shoulder roll here, a flick of the pelvis there. What at first looks like a mild send-up of academic style evolves into a perfectly natural embellishment, thanks to the super-fluency of the dancers' bodies and an easy, good-natured delivery, which is even harder to achieve.

You can't fail to admire such unerringly spot-on pirouettes. But how much more cheering to catch sight of a boy in the back row who, having fluffed a tricky double tour en l'air, follows it with a wide smile. Robert Garland is a long way from doing a Balanchine in this choreography, but it certainly made everyone feel happy.

Dwight Rhoden's Twist, a more aggressive extension of traditional steps, sets out with similar ebullience but soon gets bogged down in its own weight of attitude. Set on a dark stage lit intermittently by bands of colour, the 12 dancers in vivid unisex bikinis look fabulous, but duets with titles like Bend Buckle Screw and Writhe pit them against one another with increasingly joyless vehemence. I blame the score: a (recorded) barrage of maximal minimalism

All of which makes Paul Hindemith's taut response to George Balanchine's brief for The Four Temperaments the more thrilling – humbling, too, when you think that both music and dance score were conceived in the 1940s and still have the kind of edge that cuts. Here, too, is where Harlem reveals its true neo-classical credentials. The company has been dancing Balanchine for 30 years and it shows – not only in the distinctive placement of the soloists, but also in the confident, leggy swagger of the corps which carries much of the choreography's most blazing invention.

The Four Ts (as ballet folk knowingly call it) is Desert Island Balanchine – the piece you'd choose if denied all the others. Ostensibly it's an abstract response to the music. Yet it contains some of the most vividly suggestive images in all Balanchine's output: grand, mysterious, sometimes funny, often erotic.

I was especially struck by Phlegmatic man (the role once danced by the young Arthur Mitchell) in the hands of willowy Eric Underwood. His performance, among many fine ones, most acutely exposed the movement's emotional core. Open-hearted, sometimes touchingly gauche, at one point his dancing had all the tenderness of a fledgeling finding its wings.

This inevitably leaves you wondering where all the British ballet dancers of colour could be hiding. If these paragons of Harlem visited more often, things would change.

j.gilbert@independent.co.uk

Dance Theater of Harlem: The Lowry, Salford (0161 876 2000) Tues & Wed