The new work, "Bird Song", started from its music, and that in turn began with exactly what the title says: the singing of the Australian pied butcher bird, which provides a central episode. Around it, composer Andy Pink - who specialises in sound and music design for arts performances - has constructed a highly disparate score (including many musical quotations, six modern sources plus a Bach canon being named) proceeding from initial fury to finally peaceful settlement. Dancers less physically skilled or musically gifted could not have responded, as these do, to the tempi and emotions Davies has encouraged them to hear in the piece: surely there isn't a stronger or more creative team around. (For this work there are five women and three men.) Impressively, some passages are danced in silence but still as if the dancers are moving to music heard earlier. Davies likes to develop her ballets gradually, giving the dancers tasks from which they devise movement which she then shapes and reworks.