Even Diaghilev, experimental though he was, would not have recognized Work No 1020 by Turner Prize winner Martin Creed as a ballet. Presented by Frieze Music and Sadler’s Wells as part of a season marking the centenary of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Work No 1020 reduced the dance to its barest bones: the five basic ballet positions. The dancers were given a series of instructions, each referred to by Creed by a simple letter during the course of the 90-minute performance. Along with comments on how he perceived the ballet was progressing, Creed called the letters out, and the dancers moved accordingly. While the individual song and dance sequences were rehearsed, their order was evidently not, lending the evening a spontaneous air.

At one point, Creed called out the letter L. The drummer beat out a pulsating rhythm, and both Creed and the bass player riffed in time alongside her. The five dancers moved according to a different layer of the rhythm: every time the high-hat was hit, one leapt in the air; each time the snare drum was struck, another changed her position.

What seems to interest Creed is the purity of each constituent element of the performance: of movement, of a note, of a sound. Yet this did not come across like a cold experiment: Creed breathed humour and feeling into each one, and imbued basic elements with a resonant emotional weight.

As if he expected the audience to be perplexed, Creed told a story about how the captain on a bumpy flight told the troubled passengers that the flight had in fact been the safest part of their day. “And the same goes for this performance,” Creed quipped in his deadpan Scottish drawl. “It’s the safest part of your evening.”

The ballet worked best when the energy from the performance was overpowering. But during the moments when the music became quieter, and the dancers were required to prolong a very precise pose in time with the slower passages of music, the necessary precision was not there. Had the dancers been as tight as the band, an engaging experiment carried through with humour and conviction would have been transformed into a forceful statement.