ONE of the critical successes of the Millennium Dome was the daily show in the huge central auditorium by a small army of incredibly athletic young people which crossed the line between dance and acrobatics.

The legacy post-2000 was to have been an experienced company of young performers ready to tour middle-size venues around the country and abroad, taking this latest brand of performance to fresh audiences. It was to be Britain’s answer to Cirque du Soleil.

It didn’t work out that way, and the Generating Company all but went under this year when the costs of running a company and uncertain bookings began to look insurmountable. “A major issue,” says Paul Cockle, the producer who put together the Dome show, subsequently formed the Generating Company and is now its managing director, “has been that we don’t fit into any existing category for funding bodies. Drama, dance or circus — we’re all those things and none of them”.

Now the company has a new set-up, with a new artistic director in Abigail Yeates and a new show, Lactic Acid, which goes on tour from March 29 next year.

In 1998 Cockle responded to the call to create a show for the Dome first by getting training from Circus Space, then by recruiting Peter Gabriel to write a score, Mark Fisher to act as creative director and Pierrot Bidon, the founder of the Archaos Circus, to create stunts.

Then came the recruitment of 162 young performers — some from circus backgrounds, some from dance — and 287 technicians. There were 5,000 applications and 700 auditions, after which 87 aerialists were trained at Circus Space for a year before the opening night on New Year’s Eve, 1999.

Things began to go wrong for the Dome that night. The French director of Disney Europe, Pierre-Yves Gerbeau, was brought in as chief executive. Cockle says: “I just didn’t fit with PY and I left, which allowed me to go back to Circus Space and work on creating the Generating Company.”

What he came up with was a permanent production team with an ensemble of performers. Within two months of the close of the Dome at the end of 2000, the Generating Company — Genco as it calls itself for short — was rehearsing its first show, Storm, prior to touring.

Genco got £70,000 funding from Nesta, the lottery-funded National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, and a one-off Arts Council touring grant. It also devised summer schools for children wanting to learn the skills that Genco has made a speciality — rope dancing, for instance, requiring the performer to go through choreographed movements 12ft up a hanging rope. The first of these was held in 2002.

“The New Millennium Experience Company helped to establish circus as a legitimate arts form — there is now a full degree course at Circus Space,” says Cockle.

A blow came when a partnership with Gerry Cottle’s Circus fell through. Genco needed its own touring base and last year it threw in with Cottle to share his Mendips headquarters at Wookey Hole. “We’re not the same kind of organisation, though, and there were artistic differences,” Cockle says. Genco left in June this year.

Throughout those years new shows have been created: another version of Storm, which was at the Barbican in January last year; Gangstars, a comic journey through 1930s crime movies; and Odyssey, a take by the theatre director Josette Bushell-Mingo and the actor-choreographer Paul J. Medford on Homer’s stories.

The new £100,000 show, Lactic Acid, has been created by Abigail Yeates, formerly the star of the Dome show and now the new Genco artistic director. “It’s something different again, not so narrative-based — more about the body and the manoeuvring it is capable of,” she says.

But Genco has had to rationalise itself. It can no longer keep its ensemble on the payroll, but its cast will be brought together for rehearsals six weeks before the tour starts. “We have no core funding and have to survive mostly on what we can earn, but we are completely independent for the first time — and we have complete artistic integrity,” Cockle says.

Lactic Acid is at Circus Space from March 29, 2005 (0208-709 8343)