Whether Christopher Wheeldon's talent is big enough to sustain a whole evening turns out to be the least interesting issue in San Francisco Ballet's unique, all-Wheeldon programme.
Of course, there are moments when the choreo-grapher's invention sags or when we want a different voice. Certain tricks of phrasing recur and the sheer cleverness of Wheeldon's craft, his unrelenting inability to put a foot wrong, call attention to themselves as they wouldn't in a programme of mixed choreography.
But far outweighing the occasional repetition are the virtues. First is Wheeldon's uncanny facility for digging deep inside the spirit of his music. In There Where She Loved - a splicing of songs by Chopin and Kurt Weill - Wheeldon's choreography flips, in a beat, from blithely decorated lyricism to cruel, jagged close-up. In Continuum, he stalks Ligeti's accompanying piano music through all its extreme variations: spinning a single line of dance though long spaces of silence then slicing the choreography into hard-edged blocks that stack against the peremptory rhythms. Finally, in Wheeldon's new ballet, Rush, the speedy eccentricities of Martinu's Sinfonietta La Jolla are dealt out feverishly among a pack of dancers, before being concentrated into a mesmerisingly seamless duet.
Wheeldon knows how to translate music into movement and, on stage, his dancers are people, not just embodied notes. There Where She Loved obviously has an implied narrative but, while the lovers in its Chopin sections are deliberately generic and idealised, in the Weill songs they are sharply focused individuals. Each encounter carries its own atmosphere - the sourness of betrayal, the racing pulse of adultery - and Wheeldon encapsulates an entire relationship within a single gesture. When an anguished woman angles her leg high around her lover's neck and turns her face bleakly away, it's a vividly transitional moment, poised between neediness and rejection.
Even in the more abstract worlds of Continuum and Rush, we are drawn into an emotional web. Wheeldon's pas de deux are particularly rich in poetic detail: when dancers press their arms together, they become lovers trying to merge identities; when a woman's arm trails in space, we read uncertainty and evasion in her gesture.
San Francisco's excellent dancers gave themselves body and heart to Wheeldon's choreography. And rightly so, for Wheeldon reinvents the possibilities of ballet for those who perform his work. This all-Wheeldon show may be an extraordinary tribute to a 30-year-old choreographer, yet it is equally a gift to the company. They look fabulous in it.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 0131-473 2000.
