BABEL, from review of British Dance Edition 2010, Birmingham

* rated four stars out of five

"... BDE's first day ended with a wallop thanks to Stan Won't Dance ... Stan is back on form and ready to rumble.

The subject of the new show is free speech, and specifically how it relates to what Steel has dubbed "an entire generation in freefall". Yes, the work concerns that often lamented and faceless entity called youth culture. Yet such is the piece's timeliness and scope that it shapes up into a state-of-the-nation address with the power to make us all think.

The springboard for Babel is the British writer Patrick Neate's take-no-prisoners text. With self-righteous wit he enumerates a host of modern ills and anxieties: knife crime, the war on terrorism, racism, obesity, consumerism, celebrity hype, media bias, political self-deception. His frequently clever, cautionary diatribe is interpreted by a terrifically disciplined, all-male cast of five. Made up like zombies beneath grungy hoodies, they haunt a blasted urban landscape containing the broken skeletons of two cars, one of which has had a nosedive crash. They recite Neate's relentlessly dense, playful but excoriating words while also busting some sharp, slick moves — from hip-hop grapplings with balletic flourishes to satirical unison pop gyrations.

Babel may be too full of sound and fury. At times it's like being lectured to by a gang of 21st-century Holden Caulfields railing against the inarticulate, devalued society that threatens to consume them. None of its targets is unfamiliar. The point of Stan's sometimes dazzling achievement is to gather all this material together and hurl it at us with fresh intelligence and force."