Stately square dancing, Japanese style

Those who acquired a taste for opaque Japanese ritual at the Noh and Kabuki performances at Sadler's Wells last year will be flocking back on Sunday and Monday to see the world's oldest performance art form. Tenri Gagaku are a 30-strong troupe of dancers and musicians, taking their name from their home city and the ancient Japanese court music and dance they are dedicated to preserving. It's heartening that Gagaku doesn't spring from a single source - it's more a kind of early Asian World Music with roots in fifth-century China, Tibet, Korea, India and south-east Asia, as well as Japan. Gagaku means "elegant music" and has an associated dance form, Bugaku. It is both remarkably simple and amazingly complex, as is the Japanese way. There is a large orchestra with three kinds of flute, Chinese mouth organ, zither, lute, gongs, drums and something like a sawn- off oboe. Even so, some of the music is purely vocal. There are (basically) two forms of dance: dance of the left (saho), which originated in India, China and Vietnam, where the dancers enter stage left (clad, incidentally, in red); and dancers of the right (uho), mainly from Korea and north-east China, whose performers come on from the right - yes, in blue. According to the New York Voice critic Elleen Blumenthal it "looks like a combination of t'ai chi, Noh and stately square dancing." And the music? That "obliterates analysis".

Sadler's Wells, Rosebery Av, EC1, Sun 5 Mar, 6.30pm and Mon 6 Mar, 8pm (071-713 6000)