Random had planned to mark its 10th anniversary, and its appointment as company in residence at Sadler's Wells, with the acquisition of a new star for its latest work: an animatronic figure that could dance its own steps as it moved among the company's performers. The cost of the project proved prohibitive, but even so an army of fantastically futuristic beings can still be seen marching through Nemesis, Wayne McGregor's unsettling and often beautiful new piece.
The work is a kind of sci-fi apocalypse, in which McGregor's choreographic imagination fuses with that of his remarkable design team to evoke a collage of narratives. The first section of the dance is housed in a series of interiors - some cold, some drab, some enchanted but all ingeniously created through a mix of photographic images and abstracted lighting designs. The dancers seem to be programmed by the places they inhabit - like the sad, unravelling love duet set in a green-lit, empty foyer, or a woman's tranced solo in a church. They come across as a race of lost people.
Their end comes suddenly, with some sleight-of-hand editing that has these human figures cut and pasted into the photographic images. Then on to the empty stage march their successors - an eerie, glamorous species, part insect, part warrior - who sport long and delicately jointed limbs attached to their arms.
The steely proboscises worn by the dancers represent the cheaper version of McGregor's original project, but they still create a disturbing sight. As the dancers move, their extra limbs angle and stretch as if their own accord. It is a measure of the dancers' vivid talents and of the designers' brilliance that this section looks deadly and serious rather than the fantasy of space cadets.
Also that the coda that follows makes us feel both exhilarated and bereft. Across the empty front of the stage McGregor dances his own solo voyage though space. Whirls of computer generated ectoplasm drift around his head and he disappears into a fluttering abstract of himself - the only image left in an empty world.
This is a piece that would benefit from some tighter editing. It is also likely that another two months of performance would produce even defter handling of the dancers' animatronic limbs. Yet the piece is fuelled by an imagination that far supersedes its weaknesses. Nothing quite like Nemesis has ever been seen on the dance stage.
· At Charter Theatre, Preston (01772 258858), on Wednesday. A version of this review appeared in later editions of Saturday's paper.
