Travel, as we know, is oh so good for broadening the mind - but nowadays we fret about broadening our carbon footprint as well.

Chess
***

Hutsul's Year
***

Bite the Dust
**

Todos Los Gatos Son Pardos
****

Meli Melo II
****

All shows are at Universal Arts Theatre, 96 George Street.

Travel, as we know, is oh so good for broadening the mind - but nowadays we fret about broadening our carbon footprint as well. Never fear. You can follow in my footsteps - catch a glimpse of Taiwan, Ukraine, Poland, Spain and France, all in a day and without leaving the Freemason's Hall in George Street.

Tomek Borkowy, artistic director of Universal Arts, has been exercising his global connections again, and the result is an engagingly mixed bag of cultures and genres, parading some antique folk traditions alongside bold, contemporary approaches to flamenco - with just a shimmy of shiny-sequinned camp as the icing on the cake. The shimmy is courtesy of those 2007 Fringe darlings, Chicos Mambo, back again with more arch prancing. The cake - a little fairy sponge topped with cream and fruits of the forest - can be enjoyed at the cafe in the venue. If tales of love, jealousy and deadly rivals are more to your taste, especially if they have an oriental flavour, then Chess could be your lunch-time call.

Actually, if you think "made in Taiwan" only applies to electronic gizmos and the like, then grab an opportunity to see this heroic legend from the Chin Dynasty re-enacted (by the Dansmusicians Group, Taiwan) in the style of Chinese opera.

There is an episodic English narration, but the action speaks for itself - a wonderful flurry of acrobatic martial arts conflicts with swishing swords and appropriately dramatic percussion from three gorgeously robed female musicians.

Like Hutsul's Year, which hails from the Ukraine, there's doubtless a whole realm of meaningful detail in the colours and ornamentation of each costume, and in the set pieces of character business, gestures and movement. But even when that eludes us, there's still a quality of vividly poetic visual imagery that beguiles. In Chess, the ghostly rituals that bookend the piece are delicate yet powerful. In Hutsul's Year, the magical impact comes from the embroidered richness that isn't confined to the clothes worn by the villagers, it embellishes every aspect of their daily lives from the stories they tell to the solemn minutiae that must be observed on feast days, funerals, weddings - all the occasions that mark the passing of a year and which bind the community together.

Now there was no synopsis, no programme for the performance I attended - future audiences will be better informed. But the gist of it is clear: horrid bossy-boots woman makes family's life miserable, and then disappears from the stage. Problem solved. For sure, there were other fascinating strands. There's a sense of devout religiosity which crosses itself constantly, yet still seems woven through with old superstitions -there might be a prominent stone cross on-stage, but other standing stones (tombstones?) clearly had ritual significance, too.

Food, music, dancing: each season calls for its own distinctive celebrations which the Kolmiya Regional Ukrainian Drama Theatre imbue with a gusto that goes a long way to offset tranches of text that flit past out ears, often sounding furious but signifying zilch. If Hutsul's Year is inherently roistering and life-affirming, Bite the Dust is bleak, reducing one's spirits to a low ebb, and not just because this adaptation of Tadeusz Rozewicz's drama about Polish soldiers in the Second World War deals with how fighting, looting and killing can deaden an individual's sensibilities to the point where casual brutality becomes second nature and negates all respect for life, even one's own. More depressing than this, however, is that in so many ways this Polish production (by Teatr Provisorium i Kompania Teatr) is a four-star show diminished by the inaudibility and hard-to-follow delivery of the text.

Though played in English, and not short on expressive characterisation, too many crucial exchanges merge into muddy soundscapes. Yes, the echoes of Buchner's Woyzeck do surface. And the set design - a wheeled cart that see-saws, like a symbol of the vacillating moods and moral ambiguity of the soldiers - is as potent an image as the posts that each man has strapped to his back.

You can tell there is so much well-considered atmosphere at work here that it becomes genuinely upsetting not to be able to grasp the serious meat of the drama. The plaintive folk-song (with screened translation) tells of a heroic knight but the full contrast between the talismanic ideal and the messy realities on-stage never comes into relief.

Todos Los Gatos Son Pardos (All Cats Are Grey) is only on until August 12 - so if the prospect of flamenco with a contemporary twist appeals, don't hang about: go soon - and you may well want to go back.

Six dancers - four women, two men - have each created a short work that reflects a different aspect of night hours in a city. One piece has a slumbrous, falling asleep langour to it, another sees two dudes - company director Florencio Campo and Kelian Jimenez - hanging out on the street, eyeing up the passing talent, yet another evokes the solitary loneliness of city-dwellers, each with their own "window" of light. And if flamenco is the starting point for each member of Arrieritos, it's used with a degree of imagination that refreshes. the traditional style - keeps faith with its intricacies of rhythm, its inflections of body line, its spirit and sensuality, but allies this essence with the lifts, floor work and dynamics of contemporary dance.

The mix is then free to go funky or jazz-based, even a bit grungy with thrash metal on the side. Witty, sexy, meditative - the night might make all cats look black, but this is no "one-tone for all" display. And it's superbly well danced.

Meli Melo II reprises last year's divine comedy of dance-y numbers where the girls are all guys, even on pointe. Philippe Lafeuille and Xavier Senez are joined by two new boys - Gregory Gonel and Jannick Hugron - in what is one of the classiest, sassiest acts in town. Yes, they don the feathers and frou-frou of cabaret drag, but these four can all dance like demons as well as divas.

The Bollywood spoof is a hoot, as are the little-missy gymnasts - but the Swan Lake pastiche is underpinned by strong technique and the flamenco solo, in just a skirt, is so elegantly sinuous and feline it would make many a Spanish dancer rattle their castanets with envy.

All shows - except Todos Los Gatos Son Pardos - run until August 25.