When he succeeded Darshan Singh Bhuller as director of Phoenix Dance Theatre last year, Javier De Frutos inherited a company in excellent shape. Yet it hasn’t taken him long to remake the Leeds-based troupe in his own uncompromising image.

As a choreographer, De Frutos has always pursued a high-risk strategy, his work an intriguing combination of the sensual and the sensationalist. With his two newest dances, on show at Sadler’s Wells, De Frutos gave us extremes of both. Despite the best efforts of Phoenix’s revitalised dancers, neither proved as successful as their director must have hoped.

His newest piece, receiving its world premiere before the company takes it to the Venice Biennale, is awash with sensuous entanglements. Set to sacred music by Mozart juxtaposed with the Hawaiian song Aloha ’Oe (all recorded), Paseillo is a hotbed of sexual intrigue and lush couplings, both gay and straight. The seven dancers are swept up in almost stately expressions of passion, rivalry and jealous confrontations, delivered in rounds like a boxing match. Jean-Marc Puissant contributes a striking set, the dancers have fun with the choreography’s physical sweep, but Paseillo loses momentum too soon.

Dances don’t come more sensationalist or violent than Los Picadores, De Frutos’s outrageous take on Stravinsky’s Les Noces. Originally conceived as the composer’s evocation of a Russian peasant wedding, it’s here reimagined as Stravinsky meets Fight Club. Staged as a realistic choreographed brawl (with a fight directing credit to Terry King), it looks as if there is nothing faux about it.

Six seemingly blood-splattered dancers kick, beat and pummel each other as four men and two brave women mount a titanic battle of the sexes. The brutality is awesome and unrelieved, the carnality is described in fierce dance that hammers home its point beyond the limits of endurance. The music is an earsplitting recording by the Pokrovsky Ensemble, so shrill that it’s torture. Los Picadores may sound daring, but by the end, with a murdered bride the inevitable conclusion, the whole is just a ludicrous bloodbath.

Two fascinating pieces by other choreographers completed the Wells bill. Henri Oguike’s Signal features five dancers captivated by his imaginative and quixotic response to a wealth of Japanese percussion sounds. The piece brims with bravado energy and moody cameos: introspective, angry, exhausting, and as full of heat as the fire pots lined up at the back of the stage.

Harmonica Breakdown (1938) is a passionate solo of joy and suffering by Jane Dudley. Here danced by Kialea-Nadine Williams, it still stands as a potent affirmation of personal dignity in the face of adversity.

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