DO you look at a painting first before reading the accompanying note by the artist? Would you apply the same practice to the equally visual medium of dance, particularly on a Thursday night when the Playhouse was greenhouse-hot, making wafting your programme more important than reading it?

Do you watch dance for its sensuality, its physicality, its ensemble chemistry and individual flair, without seeking to impose meaning on its structures? Your reviewer asks because choreo-grapher Christopher Bruce introduces his new work Shadows by saying: “I am happy to leave the audience to interpret the work individually.”

On home turf, Leeds company Phoenix Dance Theatre open with two Bruce pieces: 2007’s Shift, a mechanical, briskly metronomic work in which Vanessa Vince-Pang dances dazzlingly, and the aforementioned premiere of Shadows, more turbulent in style, danced to Arvo Part. As companion pieces, they lessen the impact of each other; splitting them would have been more effective.

Artistic director Sharon Watson continues her exploration of science in TearFall, a response to the chemistry, biology and humanity of crying. Introduced in a bite-sized lecture in white briefs – now that would shake up the classroom! – by American dancer Prentice Whitlow, the dancing is later accompanied by that allegedly rare sound: a man crying. TearFall flows, but not like tears flow; it is more scientific than emotional both in shape and impact. There’s plenty of movement, but it fails to move you.

Bloom, by New Adventures Choreographer Award winner Caroline Finn, is colourful, humorous and fascinating all at once. You don’t need to read up that it explores facades “in a little surreal universe with surreal characters”. The masks, the muffled voices, the Frank Bennett lounge version of Radiohead’s Creep, all indicate that. Meaning is not hidden here.

• Phoenix Dance Theatre, Mixed Programme 2015, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, tonight at 7.30pm, then on tour until May 28. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or wyp.org.uk