CATCH them if you can as they speed from venue to venue during their tour this year.

Cwmni Ballet Gwent, the Welsh independent Ballet Company, stopped for just three nights in Guildford to present its own version of "As You Like It" - a full-length ballet based on William Shakespeare's convoluted comedy - performed at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre.

The company founded by Darius James is small and singular with enough zest and creative imagination to make it stand out like a tiny bright star from among many larger dance and ballet troupes.

Darius who was born in Newport, where the Ballet Gwent is now based, has assembled an outstanding team of ballet dancers with intelligence and talent to give life and meaning to his unique choreography of yet another of the Bard's more light-hearted plays. A Midsummer Night's Dream (1997), The Tempest (1998) and Twelfth Night (1999) have all conjured up their own brand of magic when danced to music by Mendelssohn, Sibelius and Hadyn, with eye-catching body-hugging costumes against distinctive backdrops.

'As you Like It' with its combination of colourful characters, who fight, frolic and love in Shakespeare's Forest of Arden, is ideal material for a Darius James ballet using music by J. S. Bach played on canned harpsichord, bongos, guitar and pipes which at times sounds like water gurgling down a drain, but which dovetailed neatly with the choreography to produce some lively dance styled for the individual characters.

Jerky Country dances for the rustics (Silvius, Phebe and Audrey), stately minuets for aristocrats and pulsating rhythm for the jester Touchstone, danced by the diminutive Matilde Pedriera. Matilde dressed in vivid harlequin colours twirls and leaps around the stage like a frenzied firefly.

And unless my eyes deceived me one or twice some very classical jive creeps briefly into the ballet.

A rather loose pas de trois with Rosalind, Celia and Orlando playing a sort of cat and mice game is danced to the full orchestral accompaniment of Air on a G String and likewise Bach's music for Sheep May Safely Graze is used for Orlando and Rosalind' concluding tender, if somewhat pastoral, pas de deux.

Rosalind is danced by Caroline Wright who hails from Lancashire and trained at the Royal Ballet School and Orlando by Darius himself who still dances brilliantly as well choreographing the ballets and keeping the show on the road.

Unusually for classical ballet, word and song are used in these highly imaginative productions. "All The World's A Stage" is softly voiced over while the dancers play out the seven ages on a darkened stage and a disembodied version of one of the play's jolly ditties 'It was a lover and his lass', underline that's all is well that ends well.

Cwmni Ballet Gwent might run on shoestring (they have no major grants) with just eight dancers and taped music, but their artistic director has discovered a winning formula which endears this small company to audiences throughout the country.

Suzanne Cansfield

The Herald Arts pages are where you'll find the nest reviews of a wide range of theatre and music each week.