Undance – review

Undance is a collaboration between the visual artist Mark Wallinger, the composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and the choreographer Wayne McGregor. All three are practitioners working within the exploratory, questioning sector of their disciplines, so when Sadler's Wells commissioned a collaborative performance piece from them, expectations for a challenging result were high.

Wallinger took the lead, providing Turnage and McGregor with a series of starting points. These included the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering investigations of human action and locomotion, and the 1967-8 "Verb List" of the contemporary sculptor Richard Serra, which Serra used as a starting point for much of his work. Having travelled to a number of conflict zones, Wallinger had been struck by the ambiguity of the UN (United Nations) signs that he saw. After a time, he says, he began to read them as un-, as in the sense of a reversal of a previous action. This undoing notion – could the UN undo political strife, he wondered – fed into the Muybridge and Verb List ideas, and is also evident in Wallinger's set, which sees the grid before which Muybridge placed his subjects translated into a kind of wire fence set between two UN compound gates.

In play, then, we have the forensic examination of human actions (Muybridge's researches multiplied by Serra's list of verbs), and the idea of their mirroring, undoing and reversal. Wallinger's cage-like set also sends a strong message relating to confinement. Turnage has responded with a score that is highly varied in texture and colour. Themes are introduced, laid open, symmetrically flipped, and reduced to single shafts of sound that hang blade-like in the air. McGregor, meanwhile, as if in recognition of the possibility of a multi-vehicle conceptual pile-up, has kept things lambently simple. Actions are stated, enacted, and subjected to reversal by the 10 fine dancers of his company, Wayne McGregor Random Dance. Projected on the grid behind them, like a ghostly corps de ballet, we see those same actions filmed from a different angle, or relayed a few seconds out of sync.

Surprisingly, given the ideas-intensive nature of the project, it is the aesthetics of the piece that one carries away. The fluttering angularity of Turnage's score, and the counterpoint between the stern confinement of Wallinger's set and the detailed playfulness of McGregor's choreography. There are moments of overt reference, when McGregor recreates Muybridge's wrestling men, for example, or constructs a circular sequence set to strobe lights imitating a zoetrope, but for the most part this is the choreographer in unconfrontational mode, attending to grace-notes and details, and courteous in his deference to Turnage's score. In an extended duet for Alexander Whitley and Fukiko Takase we see hints of the old spikiness, but McGregor's framing of the pair is airily beautiful, and there are moments when its mechanics and emotional loading recall the finer pas de deux of Kenneth MacMillan. Quite a surprise, then. I thought that there was a danger of this piece sinking under the weight of its theory, but happily, everyone swims.