It gives a boost to Irish dance - and Irish audiences - to experience the work of fine choreographers from abroad, such as Charles Cre-Ange of France and Philippe Saire of Switzerland. Dance Theatre of Ireland responded with outstanding performances on Tuesday.

Saire's A Question of Distance opened with the dancers positioning and repositioning themselves in attempts to preserve their individual spaces. When, to the music of Marin Marais, Karl Friedrich Abel, Nat King Cole and Areangelo Corelli, they found those spaces encroached, polite apologies turned to aggression. In fact, their attempts to pass and repass each other in the constricted area of Marc Gallione's rectangles of light was a more athletic and graceful version of what the audience experienced in the bar during the interval.

Cre-Ange's Cha-Cha-Cha d'Exil showed the problems of fitting in in a foreign land and communicating when you speak different (body) languages. And the more you fail to get through to someone, the wilder your efforts. Fast, agitated, angular movements led to thrashing and meshing limbs to the music of Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, Leftfield, Cake and Brahim Ferrer. Bianca Arrieta, Stefano Botto, Niamh Condron and Robert Jackson gave brilliant performances in both pieces, with Robert Connor and JJ Formento in the first and Peta Coy in the second.

Continues at the Tivoli (01-4544472) until tomorrow, then tours to Cork, Longford, Galway, Sligo, Kilkenny and Blanchardstown, Dublin.