This year, thanks to the continuing support of Scottish Power, Ballet Central comes of age. The company consists of the graduate dancers of the Central School of Ballet, who go on a national tour to gain stage experience before looking for jobs. The success of the school, and of this intelligent climax to their training, is clear from the number of ex-students to be found in major companies here and abroad. Fittingly, their 21st year has produced a vintage crop.

In order to give most of the 27 dancers their moment in the spotlight, and to show off the wide range of styles they have mastered, the programme consists of nine works ranging from 19th-century classics to abstract contemporary. Right from the start, in Jenna Lee's Balanchine-influenced Moving On, certain dancers sprang to notice. The work featured the tall, elegant Lucy Barnes, but in the background it was impossible not to notice Julia Davies, a tiny dancer with a huge and likeable stage personality, and I was not surprised to find her heavily featured later in the programme.

Rendezvous and Futility, by Sara Matthews, a former Rambert dancer, is based on poems by Alan Seeger and Wilfrid Owen, two poets killed during the First World War, read, slightly quirkily, by Sir Derek Jacobi. The futility of creating life only to have it taken away is the theme, and here we have a duet which is actually one long solo followed by another. First, in an exhaustingly long passage, the excellent Julien Roussel confronts his rendezvous with death, and then lies motionless on the stage while Charlotte Brown dances her heart out, sorrow in every line and gesture of her being.

Next something classical and jolly the Ear of Corn duet from Coppelia followed by Swanilda's dance with her friends. Stephen Bazeley, as Franz, doesn't have much to do but looks good; Satako Hinata, one of four Japanese dancers in the company, is everything you could wish for light, charming, technically on top of the classical choreography, perfectly built surely a star of the future. Later, in the fireside duet from Christopher Gable's Cinderella she shows the extent of her emotional rage, as the shy, ragged waif is found by her prince, and abandons herself to him in an ecstatic duet full of complex lifts and swooning, lyrical dancing. She is well partnered by Robert Phillips.

Waltzing is Hip features Leonne Campbell, another sparkler, while Sir Peter Wright's pas de six from Giselle allows Claire Voss to show fine form, and an understanding of period style. Going South for the Winter makes an enjoyable and suitable end, with 12 dancers in blue body-stockings fluttering off to warmer climes. It features, as did the opening work, music by the remarkable Philip Feeney, a Beethovenian figure crouched over the theatre's tiny keyboard and playing it close to bursting point. It reminded me of a review of the first performance outside Russia by the great Vladimir Horowitz: "At the end, the piano lay on the stage like a slain dragon."

Ballet Central are at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London, on July 7 and 8.