NEVER has a show been more rubbish than Stomp and yet surely the best recycling project of all time.

For 20 years now, Brighton percussionist Luke Cresswell and Yorkshireman Steve McNicholas’s impromptu percussion, dance and loose-limbed comedy show has been making music and joy from the useless, the disposable, the rejected, the binned and the bin itself.

Unlike our shopaholic society, nothing and no one goes to waste in this urban environment; everything has a beat and everyone a pulsing heartbeat that celebrates life, whatever it throws at you, be it match boxes, empty cartons or even a kitchen sink.

It starts so quietly, the lights still up as a big lad in boots, slacker fatigues and socks up to his knees ambles on with a broom, coughs, and starts idly brushing the stage, until his brushwork turns into a rhythm.

He has the comedic, looning look of Eddie Izzard about him, helpful for bonding instantly with the audience in a show that makes plenty of noise but has no words, save for a nodded “All right?” as the big lad (Cameron Newlin) is joined one by one by fellow workmen.

Five more men, two women, all in work boots, all carrying broom sticks, go to work, and what is outwardly an old building site with garbage, dustbins, scaffolding and discarded signs becomes a percussion playground.

No tea breaks for them, no interval for us, they will work themselves into a frenzy over 100 minutes of disciplined, drilled, dazzling rhythms, street beats and street dance, with Newlin as the leader of this grungy beat generation.

As he did when your reviewer last saw Stomp in 2004, Paul Bend links each routine, the scrawny Stan Laurel slapstick figure shunted from his perch by brawnier men or Sarah Lasaki’s flame-haired all-action girl and similarly kick-ass Gemma Shields.

Routines follow a regular path, beginning with puzzlement, curiosity or wonder and the child-like thrill of discovery as junk and everyday objects are sounded out for their percussive possibilities, rhythmic flexibility or musical interaction.

They can be loud, very loud, but variety is vital to this show, and while pretty much everything is on a collision course, sounds can be made as much from hollowed soft tubes, pens on teeth and plastic bags as from truck-sized tyre innards, bouncing basketballs and dustbin lids in the celebrated heavy-metal carnival finale, oil drum stilt-walking and all.

Amid the athletic clatter from clutter, the bashing and crashing and even splashing of water, a light show stands out as the flick and click of Zippo lighters provides a symphony of flickering of flames. Smoking might not be good for you, but what a sideshow its source of fire can produce.

Still breathtaking, rebellious, furious fun after two decades, Stomp is the Big Bang you can celebrate.

• Stomp, Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york

Performances: tonight and tomorrow, 7.45pm; Friday, 5pm, 8.30pm; Saturday, 4pm, 7.30pm.