Literate, thoughtful and serious, Kim Brandstrup ranks as one of the most honest and honourable of contemporary choreographers. A proper grown-up, scorning bad-boy sensationalism or visual gimmickry, he compensates in solid consistent craft for whatever he may lack in striking originality, and the double bill he presented earlier this month as part of Deborah Warner’s season in the chapel-like Ustinov Studio behind Bath’s Theatre Royal is quietly and characteristically satisfying.

Can we have a moratorium on the title of Metamorphoses? It’s become a tired cliché

Its subject matter draws on that bottomless source, classical myth. First comes a version of an episode in the saga of Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur, focused on Theseus’ abandonment of Ariadne and the return of the Minotaur as a ghost, haunting his sister Ariadne who was complicit in his murder. Brandstrup is good at telling stories: his choreographic language is lucid and lean, without superfluity or contortion, and the action is forcefully articulated. Matthew Ball may be too palpably a nice guy to convince me as a self-centred cad of a Theseus, but Kristen McNally makes Ariadne’s grief hotly vivid and, as the disembodied Minotaur, the astoundingly lithe and resourceful Tommy Franzen scales walls and swings off perches with supernatural simian grace.

The second half of the evening turns to Cupid and Psyche, the fable of the mortal maiden seduced in her sleep by an amorous god whom she never sees. Brandstrup explores this idea through an extended duet for Ball and Alina Cojocaru, their faces nuzzling and their limbs gently entwining as they move towards the light and perhaps a revelation of the true nature of one another. Their sensuality is touching, so tenderly and delicately rendered.

My major gripe relating to both pieces is the way that music is treated: like so many choreographers today, Brandstrup uses it more as a casual soundtrack or backdrop than something organically necessary, the soil out of which the dance grows. A hotchpotch of Bach, Schubert, Gubaidulina, Pärt and folk tunes has been cooked up; one might as well fling Josquin des Prez and Taylor Swift into the mix for all that they enhance anything we see on stage. And a minor grumble: can we have a moratorium on the title ‘Metamorphoses’? Like ‘Frankenstein’, it’s become a tired cliché indiscriminately employed, whether it’s Ovid or Kafka who is invoked. But with such fine performers and numinous environments conjured by designers Justin Nardella and Chris Wilkinson, this was a beautiful event.

A second visit to the Resolution Festival of new choreography at the Place introduced me to further rookie talents, all of them with something substantial to impart.

Jasmin Saulo marshalled a squad of consecrated squaddies, oiled, bare-chested and fired up by ritual. But their strength seems to be fading: at least that’s how I saw it – the programme note suggests a quest for a healing of ‘the cracks of a broken soul’.  The plight of two isolated males ensued. Bald Jameywamey sits forlornly on a chair, clutching a bottle of water. When he stands up and starts to move, his body is sinuously elastic but on the edge of existential despair; at any moment one feels he might give up and collapse in a heap, another broken soul. Somehow he keeps going, failing better, as Samuel Beckett put it. Then comes Fabio Pronesti, a sullen and hirsute Italian who stares resentfully at the audience and flicks through his book of childhood memories: playing with lighted matches, crawling on all fours, running round the stage like a boy chasing the wind in order to fly his kite. In a final fadeout, he takes an unconscionably long time to pour himself a drink, creating a huge puddle as the glass overflows. God knows what it all means – we can’t hear his mutterings – but he is strangely riveting.