(★★★☆☆)Įnjoyable as McGregor’s piece is, Christopher Wheeldon’s returning Ancient Greece fantastia Corybantic Games (from 2018) still comes as something of a relief after it: for its easy, confident neo-classicism, its formal but playful beauty, its fantastic Bernstein score. With Lucy Carter’s lighting bathing the action in a series of rich hues, and the only three-dimensional set-cum-prop a large, part-mathematical, part-corporeal right-angle on the left of the stage, the cumulative result is strange, atmospheric and remote, like watching exotic, androgynous alien life-forms from the window of a passing space-ship. A pair of dancers greet each other like inquisitive, Merce Cunningham-esque birds elsewhere, rather magically, a duo alternately, serenely raise their legs like probing sea anemones’ tentacles. A leg is shot gracefully up to a hyper-extended “six o’clock”, but, rather than being lowered with similar lyricism, the joints suddenly seem to collapse, as if internally rearticulated.

One moment, heads are balletically high, necks straight, carriage proud next, shoulders are rounded, necks craned improbably, animalistically forward. Similarly, a large, flat isosceles triangle (by artist Carmen Herrera, who died last year) spans the backcloth – squint, and it could even be a distant volcano, a sense heightened by the rumbling, primal, mercurial score by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir.įrom the eye-catching opening boy’s solo, the steps themselves are no less protean. On uniformly fantastic form, at once relishing and rising to the piece’s athletic challenges, the dancers wear unitards (by Burberry, no less) whose angular patterns cut across the traditional lines of the body. And, though it bears all the familiar choreographic McGregor hallmarks, its sense of mystery is undoubtedly one of its greatest assets. It does, too, arguably suit an ambitious, not entirely unpretentious, curiously hypnotic series of abstract vignettes that see the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer try his level best to rewire the human body into new shapes, new patterns, new ways of moving.

Still, what’s in a name? And visual artists have, after all, been deploying the same trope for decades: why should they be entitled to all the untitled fun? Untitled, 2023: it feels archly self-negating, but also rather over-eager for the piece it represents to be regarded as a Work Of Art. There’s something about the title of the new 35-minute work by Wayne McGregor that slightly sets the teeth on edge.

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