Duncan created “Dance of the Furies” in 1911, giving vivid shape to the venomous divinities who taunted Orpheus at the gates of Hell. Durante has restaged the ten-minute piece with the help of Duncan authority Barbara Kane, reviving the malice of these demons, who hunch and heave, dropping to the floor and rising for creepy cat-like leaps. Crouching in candlelight, their fingers wrenched like claws, Durante’s five dancers conjure a deliciously witchy atmosphere. There’s too much poise among this bunch to approach anything truly ugly, but there’s fire in their beating fists and swinging hair, a dark, primal hunger that thrusts outwards. The shock factor of the contorted choreography has faded—it must have seemed repulsive to early audiences, used to sugary ballets and cheery vaudeville acts—but its vivacity resonates, urged on by the bounding notes of Gluck’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” opera.

Durante herself was slated to perform the bill’s second piece, Frederick Ashton’s 1976 tribute to the late choreographer, but an injury saw Begoña Cao of English National Ballet step into this solo last-minute. Behold the ballerina draped luxuriously across the floor, kitted in a coral tunic and shiny finger waves. Ashton’s interpretation is distilled into five piano waltzes by Brahms, refracted through a classical lens that marries balletic glides with Duncan-branded inflections: clenched fists, cocked legs, scooped postures and flinging arms. It’s an ode to the artist at her most lyrical, and Cao rises to its poeticism, resplendent as she twizzles a canopy and scatters petals around the stage.

Duncan was taken with Greek mythology, and there are through-lines to this fascination across the programme, starting with the urns dotted around the stage in each piece. These vessels spit fire in “Dance of the Furies,” pose ornamentally in “Five Waltzes.” In Joy Alpuerto Ritter’s “UNDA,” receiving its premiere here, they hold water that pours in from the sky. Those familiar with Duncan’s biography will know that water was a source of both inspiration and suffering, particularly after her children’s tragic drowning. Ritter embraces it as a symbol of cleansing. There are nods to storms, waves, rivers, baptisms; the six dancers dip their hands in the urns and wash their faces. The piece climaxes with a hair-flinging crescendo, the cast soaking their manes and thrashing in tandem.

Elsewhere are snaking formations and ripples of waving torsos. Ritter nods to Duncan technique, which champions the solar plexus as an axis for energy, though her choreography mixes all kinds of vernaculars, from classic fall-and-recovery to kathak-style chugs. Gentle moments of sisterhood dot the opening scenes, but the half-hour work steadily chugs towards a bolder aesthetic that includes aggressive floorwork and throbbing contortions. To stage right is cellist Lih Qun Wong, who fashions a magnetic soundtrack out of fleet-fingered strings and ragged gasps into the microphone.

With both ballet and contemporary dancers in the cast, there’s a range of dynamics to lap up: soft classical, brassy hip-hop, sleek contemporary, even traces of tanztheater. An extended interlude costs the work some of its momentum, but its passion never wanes.