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This essay explores the source material for Andrée Howard's 1947 narrative work for Ballet Rambert, The Sailor's Return. Howard based her libretto for the ballet on David Garnett's 1925 novel of the same name, closely following his story of a West African princess who marries an English sailor and encounters racial prejudice in England. I examine the textual and choreographic contexts for the ballet, relating its visual rhetoric and movement vocabularies to a variety of sources from nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature and dance. In investigating the novel, we find that Garnett drew on Richard Burton's 1864 anthropological account of Dahomey (now Benin) in West Africa, especially his striking descriptions of Amazonian dance. I locate these transmissions between text and dance in the context of modernist discussions ofprimitivism, showing that while aspects of Howard's ballet conform to enduring primitivist traditions, its focus on the female protagonist's individuality and ethnic origins reflects the anthropological thrust of the textual sources and offers a striking critique of racism in a realist mode. Howard's choreographic style can also be located in the context of contemporary experiments in black performance dance. Her sensitive handling of sources shows her important contribution to narrative ballet and the distinctiveness of her presentation of female experience in the period.

Using an incomplete silent film of the work, Mark Baldwin, [Rambert]'s director, has confected a brutish narrative that borrows steps from [Andree Howard], but not their relationship to their music. He has had the piece designed by Michael Howells as a display of Perspex furniture amid pendant yards of Spanish moss, (so like rural England) with, for Mrs [Tebrick], a costume unflattering and unconvincing, and has acquired a new score from Benjamin Pope. What I disbelievingly saw were trumpery dramatics, danced with an entire lack of sensitivity or credibility. I think it a defamation of Rambert's glorious past.

The evening opened with two works from Rambert's Workshop season. Angela Towler and Martin Joyce were lively in Divine Influence, flapping silk skirts to Beethoven.CameronMcmillan's Verge, set to Elspeth Brooke's squelches and creaks, was harder to bear. The women, in black dresses by Roland Mouret, flung themselves on and off chairs. Weirdly, Mouret dressed the men in underpants, with one sock each. Did the others get lost in the wash?

Stand and Stare, the other substantial piece in this birthday programme, is inspired by the painter L S Lowry and had its first performance a couple of months ago in the Salford theatre that bears his name. Rather than be obvious and replicate Lowry's familiar smoke-stack scenes, Darshan Singh Bhuller transmutes the feeling of the pictures into lines of bouncy movement from all 19 dancers. Designer Craig Givens's mobile fabric panels from which a brushy image of the artist's face peers down have a disquieting omnipresence, while Bartk's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion supplies fabulous rhythmic impetus, if about 10 minutes more than is needed. In my experience, it's increasingly common for a choreographer's ideas to be outrun by his chosen music, but in the case of Bhuller vs Bartok there was never any contest to begin with. Happily, the London Musici, playing live in the pit, give a terrifically virile account, so one is content for the dance to time itself out while the score works its spikey logic to the last.

There is, intentionally, no storyline in Darshan Singh Bhuller's Stand and Stare, which is inspired by LS Lowry but makes no attempt to reproduce the pinched urban landscapes of his canvases. As the title suggests, this is a piece about vision. Lowry's own gaze stares at us from four panels that frame the stage, while the dancers are reduced to a rhythmic abstract of Lowry's famous crowds.

Yet all that has survived of [Andree Howard]'s original choreography is an extended duet, to which [Mark Baldwin] has added a new choreographic frame, a new score by Benjamin Pope and luminous designs by Michael Howell. And what we see on stage isn't enough to make sense of all the additional twists in the narrative, as the fox is plunged into a struggle between her feral instincts and her marriage. Nor is it really enough to explain to Rambert's regular audience why they are seeing this curio from the past, where the joins between Baldwin's adroit invention and Howard's more old-fashioned rhetoric are often intrusively evident.