SINNER, preview

"What drives someone to walk into a bar and plant a bomb with 500 nails in it?" asks the dancer, choreographer and director Liam Steel. He is referring to David Copeland. It was five years ago yesterday that the bomber targeted London's black, Asian and gay communities, causing devastating injury and death.

Copeland's heinous actions are a primary springboard for SINNER, an intense two-hander that is to have its premiere on Thursday and Friday at the South Bank Centre in London. The piece is the inaugural effort of Stan Won't Dance, a new company formed by Steel and fellow dancer and dancemaker Robert Tannion. As an extra feather in his cap, Tannion is also one of the South Bank's resident dance artists.

The men, both in their 30s, are physically complementary. Steel, born in Grimsby, is compact and slightly elfin. Tannion, from Australia, is swarthier, brawnier and a touch Mephistophelean in his features. "We're not carbon copies of each other," says Steel. "But we are both working class blokes. Neither one of us from the type of family where you'd be dancing at all."

Nevertheless, between them they have racked up credits with the likes of Theatre de Complicité, the choreographer Russell Maliphant and the theatrical pacesetters Frantic Assembly. Undoubtedly, their biggest shared influence has been as former members of DV8 Physical Theatre, where they met in the late 1990s. Lloyd Newson's company has gained a reputation for hardhitting and imaginative stagings in which movement is aligned with meaty themes.

"Most dance I see," Steel says, "actively negates the performer's own experiences and emotions. With DV8 that was often our starting point. The work wasn't about upholding any aesthetic. It was about being with others who wanted to say something about life and the world in which we live."

That kind of raw topicality is a motivating force behind SINNER. South Bank audiences will get a half-hour "taster" version. At double that length, the full show will tour extensively in the autumn. Ambiguously billed as "a self-destructive solo for two men", the performance fuses spoken text and physically charged motion to probe dark human impulses and to challenge notions of normality and transgression.

"We need icons of good," Steel says, "whether it's Lady Di or the Pope. We also need icons of evil. But who are the people who have committed evil acts, like Copeland? As a society we don't like to take responsibilty for them. Yet at what point could any one of us be pushed to an act like that?"

Steel and Tannion play strangers who meet in a bar. Rehearsing a scene at the Laban dance conservatory over Easter weekend, they talk while executing a rough-and-tumble series of pretzelling flips and rolls. The hard-flung flow with which they hook on to and vault off each other expressively punctuates their characters' words.

"We're using movement to show or suggest the interior personality," Tannion says, "and to ask, 'Who do we sell ourselves to be on the outside?' If I pass someone on the street, how am I to know if that person is a child molester, or if he's just beaten his wife up that morning? Just because you meet someone with a calm demeanour, it doesn't mean he's not freaking out inside." Steel chimes in: "It's all these contradictions in society that we want to look at; provoking people in the audience to question themselves."

Playing on the dynamic duo's surnames, Stan Won't Dance underscores their nose-thumbing defiance of artistic compartmentalisation.

"Our work," Steel promises, "is going to take the combination of text, movement and film into a whole new realm of complete integration. We want to collaborate with designers, writers, composers and performers right from the beginning, taking risks and making discoveries together; maybe coming from different angles, but trying to find a meeting point."

To that end he and Tannion have enlisted Ben Payne, associate director of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, to write the script for SINNER. It has evolved pretty much alongside the creation of the choreography. Fascinated by "the speficity of words and the ambiguity of movement", Payne says they are two languages. "I'm not writing for dance. That's Rob and Liam's language, not mine. Things will work best if the two languages play to their own strengths and contrast very strongly."

Payne acknowledges a variety of sources for the show. "But the bombs that David Copeland planted in Brick Lane, Brixton and Soho five years ago are part of where it started, certainly. On the night they exploded I ended up working in the Stonewall office [the gay pressure group] as they dealt with responses to what had happened. Over that weekend it seemed that half expressed sympathy and outrage; the other half more or less voiced their full support for Copeland's actions."

That's reason enough to let this SINNER out into the world.