Amid the well-known male artists showcased in this year’s Dance Umbrella (Mark Morris, Jirí Kylián, Michael Clark, Lin Hwai-Min) it’s worth remembering that one of this country’s most consistently innovative and thoughtful choreographers is female. I mention this only because last week the festival felt it necessary to hold a discussion forum called Where are the Women?, a debate that tried to find ways to promote women in choreography while bemoaning their lack of profile in Britain.

Unlike many of her female colleagues in contemporary dance (who have moved on to other things, or have chosen to work on a smaller scale), Jeyasingh has remained loyal to the pursuit of pure movement and the search for new means of expression within it. Her company’s Dance Umbrella appearance this year showed how determined she is to continue doing so.

A double bill at the Queen Elizabeth Hall paired a world premiere, Bruise Blood, with a revival of Faultline (2007). The latter is a piece very much influenced by a sense of time, place and social comment, with film of disaffected young Asian men hanging about in the street, a disturbing image of contemporary malaise filmed in Southall and Brick Lane. You could say that Faultline is where we all live, whether we realise it or not. The male dancers, costumed in workaday shirts and ties, offer an unsettling combination of sudden aggression and unexpected compassion. The women they encounter are ballsy and invigorating; the choreography is strong, slicing and athletic, but the atmosphere is dark, bleak and isolating. The music (by Scanner, with composition for live voice by Errollyn Wallen) is alive with a general air of stress, while Patricia Rozario’s keening soprano sets the seal on youth’s yearning to belong.

Bruise Blood, the new piece, is also saturated with the distress of 21st-century urban life, though here it has a more embracing demographic. Any of us could feel sympathy with its chaotic, scattered energy. The work’s calling card is Shlomo, an extraordinary beatboxer who can seemingly make his voice do anything. With his vocal explosions and rat-a-tat precision, he’s like a one-man Hollywood action film soundtrack.

Jeyasingh’s choreography is written in squiggly lines and voluble rhythms, in jagged edges and contrasting symmetrical shapes. It’s nervy yet more consciously stylish than her previous work, almost as if she is staging her own rave, an impression reinforced by lighting that bathes the stage in red. The problem with Bruise Blood, though, is the deadness and bruising repetition of its other musical component — Steve Reich remixed by Glyn Perrin — which Jeyasingh is not able to overcome. Instead of finding ways to work beyond the music, her choreography seems engulfed by it .

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