'Stealing the show' is not a popular expression in contemporary dance, as if it shouldn't be on the agenda of a serious performer, choreographer, audience member or critic it's written off as a layperson's comment, or the kind of thing that would be desirable in a television programme such as SYTYCD. Yet, no matter the variety of opinions in the theatre bar after Animal Lost, we all agreed on one thing: That she was great. 'She' is Julia Giertz, one of the six international performers in the work by Yossi Berg & Oded Graf Dance Theatre. She opened the show, and indeed, she stole it too.

The beginning of a piece is important, especially when you are an up-and-coming Israeli company performing in London and the majority of the audience has not previously seen your work. Of course I had formed preconceptions based on the bits of information I had access to in advance but I did not arrive to the performance by Yossi Berg & Oded Graf Dance Theatre with a judgement on 'what they are like', and whether I like them. Instead, I made that decision within the first ten minutes.

The leggy young woman stood in a spotlit downstage corner, wearing a white and yellow 'vintage fashion outfit' and high heels. She held her rubber horse mask in one hand and spoke to us. The words came out in rapid succession with pauses and disjointed fragments of melody in the right places to make dozing off impossible. The text seemed to broadly refer to the concepts of personal and collective identity, taking leaps forwards, backwards, sideways and diagonally. Her tone was provocative, as if to say 'if you think you can pin me down think again'. I was stunned by how precise and intense her delivery was as much as I was blown-away by the words themselves. Not often in dance theatre is the actual script what stands out. Rarely are the construction and meaning of words what excite me, primarily because the delivery of them, or the dance around them, seem to be foregrounded. In this solo both were imaginative, generous and impressive.

In retrospect I have to admit the company did not keep up this force in the forty-five minutes that followed. Yet the first scene had been so powerful that my appreciation of it lasted for longer than the duration of the performance and influenced how I experienced all subsequent scenes. In other words, during the performance I did not notice. This is what I mean by 'the beginning is important' – the order of happenings worked in their favour.

What followed was a collage of snappy one- or two-liners, heavy-breathing dancing, tension-building partner work, song lyrics we all recognise, dressing and undressing, and, not to forget, faces covered by rubber animal masks.

In the programme note the work is firstly described as 'an exploration of stereotypes, misperceptions, and social clichés'. This was made most obvious through the text with lines such as “I am a Danish dentist and I make mistakes”, or “I am Israeli and I shoot people I don't like”. Much of it became provocative without the subtlety or imagination of the opening text - clichés being dealt with in a cliché manner.

The movement seemed to refer more to the second objective mentioned in the programme note, which is 'waking the animal inside of you'. All six performers danced like their life depended on it, and they were good at it. No doubt there. Their hyper-engagement and physicality were attractive but the movement vocabulary was often generic and recognisable as 'steps' I have seen before. This makes me wonder what the place of performance cliché is in this work which so clearly addresses social cliché.