THE intensity of Beijing dancer Yabin Wang’s performance beguiles in this, her London debut. The combination of physical expression and athletic prowess — so in evidence in the film House of Flying Daggers — is framed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s exquisite choreography.

In this meditation on the creation of things, the dancers are dressed as what look like medical practitioners, going about their work in a sterile clinical environment.

Olga Wojciechowska’s powerful music score, featuring Barbara Drazkowska on piano and the hypnotic mridanga playing of Manjunath B Chandramouli underpins Cherkaoui’s abstract-expressionist narrative style.

Wang aside, Kazutomi Kozuki’s hyper-physical, muscular performance as a born-again cadaver and Elias Lazaridis’s lyrical balance catch the eye as Cherkaoui’s choreography, relentless and thrilling throughout, has the company of dancers hooked into violent sequences as they struggle to break free from scientific creation and assert their full-blooded humanity.

Wang’s aerial wheeling, falls and balances are spectacular, as is her strength as she contorts and pulsates in moments of spellbinding emotional expressiveness.

The visceral charge present in the rapid, eloquent and complex interchanges between the dancers is spliced together with transcendental moments of contemplation and fantastic moments of illusion.

The melancholy of human suffering, detachment and alienation stays long in the mind.

Review by Peter Lindley