Ballet operates inside a struggle for perfection. It tries to subdue the unruly bodies of dancers within the tailoring of classical steps, to suspend time in the rhythms of its own choreography, and to impose its symmetries on a messy world. The fact that it always falls short of its own ideals can be a source of the most poignant beauty. For William Forsythe, though, the tension between perfection and failure screams to be written large.
Eidos:Telos opens with a self-contained piece of choreography (premiered in 1994 as Self Meant To Govern) in which the dancers seem to be warring against time. Six men and women perform on a stage strewn with clocks, whose ticking marks off the beat of seconds as the dancers articulate their own response to Thom Willems's accompanying violin music.
But this straightforward competition of rhythms turns more hectic. The clocks go haywire, the violin is blasted by the noise of three amplified trombones, and the dancers' deftly detailed moves start to crumple. In the second section the danger intensifies as the work is sucked into a maelstrom of destructive energy.
At the centre of this radioactive stage is Dana Caspersen, a Persephone figure surrounded by wires and flickering TV monitors. Her ranting stream of consciousness sparks off a series of vengeful complaints from her flanking chorus of dancers, until the third part of the work restores the shocked dancers back to a world of pure choreography.
The logic of Eidos:Telos sounds simple: it is a journey from order to chaos and partway back to order again. But its effects are uneven. Some sections of the work possess a savage theatrical bleakness and a thrilling power of scale and performance. In other sections, though, the dance seems sparsely imagined, the staging brittle with theory, and (in the case of Caspersen's monologue) the text trite. At its most intense moments you feel Eidos:Telos could rank as one of the 20th century's great journeys into the underworld. At other times it just doesn't seem to go the distance.
·: Ends tonight. Box office: 020-7863 8000. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
