Nina Ananiashvili's celebrity appearances with Moscow Dance Theatre are far from the vanity projects routinely packaged around big name Russian ballerinas. Only one of the items in her current Wells season (the Don Quixote pas de deux) visits her familiar classical repertory. All of the rest are new works that take her and the company through an ambitious variety of modern idioms.
On paper the concept is admirable, yet from the moment that Stanton Welch's Green opens the programme you start to wonder how many favours Ananiashvili is actually doing herself. Green is a shameless genre ballet in which Ananiashvili's ballerina role winds through a garden of lyric neo-classical numbers. Welch positively flaunts his debt to Balanchine's Serenade (from the raptly drilled chorus to the vague sense of destiny dogging the lead dancers' steps). But his mangling of the score (Vivaldi violin concerti) is all his own as he crushes the music's airy textures beneath brutal four square moves.
All his own, too, is the flurry of bizarre period mannerisms with which he decorates the work's surface. The dancers, alternating between attitude and cutesiness, look ill at ease - worst of all Ananiashvili, whose blank face and weirdly delayed reactions make her look desperate to be elsewhere. She is much better in Alexei Ratmansky's Leah, in which she dances the titular bride haunted by her dead lover. Ratmansky's dramatic style is interesting - especially his powerfully imaged group numbers - and he allows Ananiashvili to exercise far more of her range. Her dance of possession, from which she leaps in a streak of demonic energy to strangle her putative husband, is viscerally thrilling. But like the other principals she suffers from Ratmansky's mission to pack the stage full of characters, none of whom have space to assert themselves.
Ananiashvili doesn't appear in Trey McIntyre's Second Before the Ground, although this is the work in which the company dance at their collective best. It is a ballet that presents a fixed smiley face to the world, allowing neither fatigue nor irony to deflate its skiddingly energetic variations and grandstanding choruses. Pumped up by the tribal energies of their accompanying Kronos Quartet score, the Moscow dancers know exactly what they're meant to be doing - and they do it with brio.
· Until March 6. Box office: 020-7863 8000.
