Throughout her 30-plus years as a choreographer, Pina Bausch has provoked extremes of reaction, from adulation to rage. Her influence on modern dance theatre is incalculable, and as the programme notes from Katie Mitchell and Pedro Almodóvar attest, she is also the darling of theatre and film directors. She has created an aesthetic all her own, and even if you don't like it you have to admire the strength and determination of its vision.

So when the German choreographer and her Tanztheater Wuppertal come to town, it's an event. And when she's here with Café Müller and The Rite of Spring - her seminal works from the 1970s - even her detractors must sit up and take note.

The Seventies were Bausch's finest hour - heresy, I know, but there you are - and Café Müller, the first half of this bill, is a kind of primer in everything Bausch believes about the theatre. Six performers, a stage full of chairs and Henry Purcell on the turntable: this is all that Bausch - the ultimate people watcher - needs to take up residence in the bleak café of her dancers' dreams. Drenched in futility and melancholy, it's a surreal (and baffling) memory landscape where people either hurry to go nowhere or sleepwalk through life's potential.

Bausch's trademarks are here: the obsessive repetitions, the mindless violence, the desperate attempts at human contact, the on-again, off-again clothes. The movement is built of the vernacular: running and walking, rolling and falling; the dancers (outstanding, as always) are like zombies or robots, yet each retains the power of individuality. Still, Café Müller is not without its irritations. The manic manipulation of chairs is tiresome, and at 45 minutes the piece is at the upper limits of its endurability. But this is Bausch at a time when the power of her imagination and the rigour of her creativity were untainted by the self-indulgence that overwhelmed her later work.

There are no provisos where The Rite of Spring is concerned. Bausch's 1975 creation is truly a modern masterpiece, so hard-wired into Stravinsky's score (recorded, alas) as to take the breath away. On a stage covered in tons of peat, 16 women and 16 men carve their ritual sacrifice out of the weight and duty of Bausch's frighteningly visceral choreography. It's rare to see her dancers in unison - especially on such a scale - and the impact is absolutely thrilling.

The sexual overtones are threatening and driven by biological instinct: the men are predators, the women are prey and the fear of rape is their unspoken bond. As the sacrificial victim, Ruth Amarante (pictured) delivers a feverish, panic-stricken solo that, as it must, ends up face down in the dirt. There has always been a sense of ritual about Bausch's work, and here it's in perfect harmony with her subject. The 20th century has seen countless Rites of Spring on the dance stage, but surely none can match the intensity of Bausch.

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