Sylvie Guillem, Sadler’s Wells, London

The most important thing about the programme that Sylvie Guillem brings to Rosebery Avenue is William Forsythe’s dance language as he explores her gifts and those of her partner, Nicolas Le Riche. Gone are the intellectual clap-trap and portentous dramatics that have latterly made Forsythe’s work so wearisome. Faced with artists of unerring classical skills, both at that precious career moment when physique does not betray vast understanding, Forsythe has produced a text in which he guides the academic dance into fascinating territories.

This is what he did in his earliest choreographies, and in the brilliant Woundwork and Pas./parts, which he made in Paris a decade ago. In this new Rearray he places Guillem and Le Riche on a bare and mysteriously shadowed stage. David Morrow’s score establishes a succinct sound-world that Forsythe uses as the basis for a series of solos and encounters that have the economy of haikus – incidents and studies that emerge into the light and then are absorbed by the darkness – and which boast that resonance of imagery which is the haiku’s identity.

Both dancers are simply dressed (jeans and anonymous tops). Movement develops, changes character or direction in mid-phrase, goads academism into innovation, hints at emotion – and Guillem and Le Riche are its superlative exponents. Here is a developed classicism of fascinating implications and extreme difficulty, flawlessly done by superb artists perfectly attuned to Forsythe’s demands.

Thereafter, one should leave the theatre. As a footling makeweight – before Mats Ek’s portrait of Guillem as neurotic concierge – two dancers from Nederlands Dans Theater are involved in a passage from Jiri Kylian’s 27’52”, which shows why people want to hide under plastic floor-coverings. Bye, the Ek solo, involves Guillem in dismal clothing and a mid-life crisis. She moves determinedly through tedious workaday activity, involving herself with synchronised film projections. She stands on her head. And Ek sets all this to the Arietta from Beethoven’s last piano sonata.

The Forsythe duet is glorious viewing. Dance-lovers, music-lovers, should then high-tail it to dinner.

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