Kaash, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

After touring the world for 18 months, Akram Khan's Kaash returns to London weighed down with awards and honours. I can see why. This is an ambitious, authoritative dance. Khan can be solemn, too convinced of his own seriousness, but Kaash is still worth taking seriously.

In his late twenties, Khan is already an established choreographer, the first to be made an Associate Artist at the South Bank. He trained in the Indian classical form Kathak and in contemporary dance, now working in both styles. Kaash is his most successful contem-porary work to date.

It is a collaborative work, made with the sculptor Anish Kapoor and the composer Nitin Sawhney. Kapoor's backdrop is a dark Rothko rectangle set on a lighter ground, lit as grey on white or black on red. Aideen Malone lights the floor in stripes and dapples. Sawhney's music mixes tabla and electronic beats with some spoken word. Khan picks up the energy but does not follow the music.

The dancing is furiously controlled, explosive and precise. The dancers can look locked into their steps, dancing with tunnel vision, but Khan's sense of structure lifts them. The floor patterns shift, tighten and refocus the stage space. One dancer stands still while the others move around him. In one great arc, the dancers shift from the side to the front of the stage, the line of people moving as if on a hinge.

In Khan's steps, movement impulses grow and change. The dancers swing their arms back and forth, working up momentum for the sudden release of a larger gesture. There are intricate hand movements, varied by turns of shoulder and elbow. Movement flows from the waist out into the arms; a fingertip gesture has the weight of the whole torso behind it.

Khan's classical training is an influence, but only from the waist up. Kathak uses the feet percussively, beating the floor with the heel, ball or the whole foot. As a modern dancer, Khan comes close to ignoring the feet. His dancers do not drum rhythms, and even when they travel the focus is on the upper body. A choreographer like Mark Morris can make walking and running fascinating; Khan just is not interested. The lower bodies stay blank.

Kaash has been revised. Sawhney's music used to include would-be philosophical questions - gnomic lines such as: "If nobody asked questions, there would be no answers." The voices are still there, but muffled and disguised: played quietly, the recording chopped up and sampled out of recognition.

Even without them, Kaash is slightly solemn, conscious of its own philosophical weight. In one solo, Khan throws out gestures as if he were dealing cards. They are meaningful gestures whose meaning is not clear, and there is a touch of portentousness about those underlined effects. Then the other dancers return, and Khan's sense of structure and stage space take over again.

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