Given the number of choreographers who cut and paste their scores out of a few random arias and rock anthems, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker deserves points for the absolute seriousness with which she has approached her music for D'un Soir un Jour. She has used no less than six individual pieces, by Debussy, Stravinsky and George Benjamin, each played intact.
While the work's overall trajectory follows the transition from day to night, each section evoking changes in light, mood and atmosphere, de Keersmaeker still pays attention first and foremost to the music itself. If only these excitingly good intentions had been matched by the choreography.
The evening starts out brilliantly, with a silent homage to Nijinsky's original setting of Debussy's L'apres-midi d'Un Faune. Snapshots of its iconic angular poses, beautifully lit and with a bare-breasted women taking the central role, delicately capture the ballet's feral mystery; and that sense of fraught strangeness persists in the nudging, pawing male solo which de Keersmaeker creates for her own modern Faun. There are wonderful moments too in her setting of Stravinsky's Symphony of Wind Instruments - a dance of dying falls strung out between the music's erratic spurts of energy. I loved de Keersmaeker's smart idea of screening the fake tennis match from Antonioni's film Blow-Up as a prologue to Jeux, the ballet in which Nijinsky famously hinted at sexual threesomes on a tennis court in Bloomsbury.
The mystery is how a choreographer capable such arresting images and musical felicities can slide into the empty stretches of choreographic doodling that litter the work. The bleak irony of this show is that de Keersmaeker achieves the impossible, reducing this trio of powerful choreographers to an ordeal of irritating dullness.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 0870 737 7737.
