When Sadler's Wells director Alastair Spalding commissioned four of his associate choreographers to create danceworks "in the spirit of Diaghilev" to celebrate the centenary of the Ballets Russes, the results were always likely to be diverse. The brief echoes the great impresario's command to Jean Cocteau: "Surprise me!"
Wayne McGregor's characteristically lateral response draws our attention to another centenary, that of Shackleton's voyage to the South Pole. Like the first Ballets Russes season in Paris, the expedition was the catalyst for two decades of rapid innovation, culminating in 1929 (the year of Diaghilev's death), with the first flight over the pole. McGregor underlines this synchronicity in Dyad 1909 by having a fur-clad explorer expire on stage beneath the gaze of two exotic and sexually ambiguous figures. The elegant, enigmatic dance which follows, set to a score by Icelandic composer Olafur Arnalds, features performers in diamante muzzles. Cutting-edge jewellery is very Ballets Russes (Louis Cartier was among those inspired by their productions) and I expect to see these in Bond Street by Christmas.
Dyad was followed by Russell Maliphant's AfterLight, a mesmerisingly beautiful elegy to the career of Nijinsky, set to Satie's Gnossiennes. In an unbroken stream of movement, as Daniel Proietto whirls like a Sufi dancer in a diminishing pool of light, Maliphant reprises the dancer's greatest roles as dream sequence. There, for an instant, is Nijinsky as the Rose, the Faun, the Golden Slave. There are the fleeting photographic moments from Giselle, Petrouchka and Narcisse.
Proietto, his movements as fluid as silk, his arms cutting the air like scimitars, seems to be chasing these fragmentary memories through the dying light, and you don't have to know the story of Nijinsky's descent into schizophrenia to be profoundly moved. In the past, while admiring Maliphant's craft, I've found his work too detached; but with AfterLight, so piercing in its evocation of loss, Maliphant moves into a new register. We've seen a host of Diaghilev-inspired pieces over the last year; this, for me, is the one that speaks most clearly of the wonder and the irrecoverability of those long-gone years.
Fashion designers, who create for close-up sensation rather than long-distance inspection, are rarely effective costumers for dance. Karl Lagerfeld recently demonstrated this with a hopelessly unflattering tutu for Elena Glurdjidze in English National Ballet's The Dying Swan, and Hussein Chalayan's fussy, bulky outfit for Daisy Phillips in Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's Faun compromises an otherwise compelling piece. Intercutting Debussy's famous Prélude with additional music by Nitin Sawhney, Cherkaoui shows us the meeting of two woodland beings (Phillips and James O'Hara), whose autumnal sexual union represents the complementary forces of light and dark, order and entropy, decay and regeneration. His choreography, a sensuous perpetuum mobile of snaking limbs and interlocking forms, fabulously performed, is also a calculated fusion of classicism and new dance. We live in a dualistic universe, Cherkaoui and his dancers tell us, for ever at the intersection of past and future.
Rougher sex altogether from Javier de Frutos, in Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez, a chaotic piece involving a lipsticked pope and a yelping klatsch of catamites and pregnant nuns. The set is a pink-lit collage of phallically enhanced art figures – Michelangelo meets Tom of Finland – and the music is the waltz from Ravel's Mother Goose. De Frutos, it's safe to say, has issues with the religion of his childhood. There are glancing references to Balanchine's Apollo, and the various papal buggeries and random seedings could, at a stretch, link Nijinsky's Faune to Pius VI's disquisition on nature in de Sade's La nouvelle Justine, from where it's the merest petit jeté to The Rite of Spring. This is not 1913, however, and we didn't riot. A century of theatrical outrages has made us unshockable – for which, I guess, we can blame Diaghilev.
