Enter the Woo Tang

The desire for experimentation has been a driving force behind much great art: when Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue, his need to escape the tyranny of the stereotype inspired him to stretch the traditional blues sound over different time signatures: a similar anxiety encouraged Captain Beefheart to collide free jazz and the growl of psychedelic rock. The demands of form and the needle of ambition have often combined to push music and dance into startling new territories: it is only through the absolute awareness of a heritage that innovation is genuinely possible.

The selections in Jonny Woo's latest release speak of Woo's personal engagement with the history of drag: like Miles Davis, he has wallowed in his medium's traditions and, in flashes, can embody the best of the past. When he adorns himself in feathers and speaks of his time in NYC, his face pokes out of the decadent,  divine glamour and his voice conjures the painfully bored and eroded feeling of the morning after the week before. "Petrol and gin taste the same at this time in the morning..."

Yet it is in those numbers when he applies the drag blueprint to more ambitious settings - a celebration of the kitsch TV series Wonder Woman providing a frame for a fantasy on the transvestite Olympics, or a trip down memory lane and Rochester High Street to remember his disillusioned youth - that it become clear why members of serious Russian mime acts are watching this British artist who is often compared to Kenny Everett.

The comparisons to the late, great comedy broadcaster are inappropriate: it happens that Woo is sometimes a bearded men who does drag, and Everett's legacy, which ought to be in the imaginative use of radio, has been reduced to his characters on a TV sketch show. Woo has peers - Dusty Limits, although very different in intention, shares an interest in how age changes a performer's attitude - and ancestors: he jokes about British TV poet Pam Ayres, but her cheeky poetry is reflected in his persona as well as his parody; the flamboyant drag acts of the 1970s, although their glitz makes them the commercial, neutered version to Woo's taut, savage humour.

Woo is moving drag forward, shedding the self-conscious limitations of an art that has been preoccupied with the need to amuse. Perhaps that was a necessary period for drag, the anxiety about social status reflected in acts that pandered rather than provoked. Woo is always entertaining, although his celebration of the self is rooted in an undercurrent of serious formal and emotional experimentation.

Assembly Room. 3 -27 August