Easily identified by his tattooed arms, pearl-tipped ears and silver premiere suits, renowned in the dance world for his urban gothic choreography, Stephen Petronio is New York's bad boy of modern dance.

He is best known for causing a stir by staging a performance at a London Gallery during which he, and his then partner Michael Clark, had sex.

Leaving him in charge of your classically trained, yoga-honed dance troupe, in other words, would be like leaving Nick Cave alone with your grand piano (in the early days, at least, Hove's dark balladeer liked to fill the instrument with bits of metal).

But this is exactly what Graeme Murphy, artistic director of the Sydney Dance Company, has done, delivering his 17 dancers into the hands of Petronio for a work which, fittingly choreographed to the music of Cave and his Bad Seeds, has taken the Australian dance world by storm.

This is the first time in more than a decade that Murphy has invited in a guest choreographer a rare move in the fiercely protective, ego-dominated world of modern dance. But he will no doubt have been reassured by Petronio's early declaration that the resulting piece, Underland, would be "the second work I've made while not completely out of my head".

A one-time stickler for illegal substances, this time around the artist has relied on the intoxicating influence of Cave's back catalogue, from the dysfunctional, carnival clunk of The Carny to the slow romantic swirl of Ship Song.

"The art world in general doesn't take pop music seriously," says Petronio, whose show at the Corn Exchange last year saw scores by Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed and ex-Bad Seed Blixa Bargeld. "I do, because I don't think about 'dance music' but about music that gets my juices going. The dark, emotional beauty of Nick's work speaks directly to my artistic motor."

Setting out to create "a place rather than a dance, a world shaped by Nick Cave songs", Petronio was helped in the process by long-time Bad Seeds producer Tony Cohen who, performing a sort of archaeological excavation on the master tapes, has uncovered world of subterranean noises that of the bass guitar, at the beginning of Mercy Seat, being laid on the floor and bashed with drum sticks; that of guitarist Bargeld substituting battery fans for fingers.

The result should provide the perfect complement to the choreography of Petronio who, faced largely with graduates of the Australian Ballet, has set about stripping their classical technique to its sinews. And, if the combination of Petronio and Cave still doesn't satisfy your cool levels, there's screen work by Sydney video artist Mike Daly (an apocalyptic affair, filmed during the summer of bush fires) and deconstructed costumes by Imitation Of Christ label designer Tara Subkoff.

"Underland is an attempt to imagine something 'under' or 'after' or 'sub' what we think reality is," says Petronio. "It's surreal and impressionistic. It's Mad Max meets Alice In Wonderland."

Starts at 8pm. Tickets cost £6 - £25, call 01273 709709.