Bausch/Forsythe/van Manen

Sadler's Wells

London EC1

5/5

This triple bill from English National Ballet has dancers careering headlong into hardcore contemporary choreography.

Pina Bausch’s visceral interpretation of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is a devastating cipher of female pain. It follows Hans van Manen’s beautifully tranquil Adagio Hammerklavier, featuring the company’s transformational artistic director Tamara Rojo and William Forsythe’s sublime, heavy-duty opener In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated.

This brilliantly executed suite of masterpieces offers different yet equally absorbing dance languages and aesthetics, alternating between signatures of classical ballet, deconstruction, minimalist motifs and very physical dance dramatisation.

Each home in rapidly to the choreographic intent, be it Forsythe’s rapid exploitation of dynamic structural and temporal counterpoints, Manen’s search for flight and balance or Bausch’s propulsion of the dancers into a state of profound exhaustion.

Laurretta Summerscaest and James Streeter’s neoclassical poise mesh forcefully to control the speed of movement required at the core of In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated and in Adagio Hammerklavier Summerscaest replaces velocity and power with agility and grace.

But it is Francesca Velicu’s performance as the virgin sacrifice in Rite of Spring that gives this triple bill its most frenzied and shocking.

Runs until April 1, box office: ballet.org.uk

Review by Peter Lindley