50 shades of beige: English National Ballet's Modern Masters at Sadler's Wells, reviewed

My moment of the week was stumbling into the shocking, fantastical Cabinet of Curiosities in the Alexander McQueen show at the V&A. On the walls were tier upon tier of dresses, shoes and headdresses, feathered, leathered, beaded, painted, razored, or tenderly embroidered with a fairy needle. Rotating at the centre of the room was the Spray Paint Dress that a dazed Shalom Harlow wore while robots ejaculated paint over her in 1998. What could be more sinisterly resonant of classical ballet’s erotic world? McQueen made his one and only ballet working with Sylvie Guillem 18 months before his suicide — remember her as the cross-gender Chevalier d’Eon in Eonnagata? But fashion was a vastly more permissive (and richly resourced) playpen for his darkling artistry.

My other moment of the week was the diagonal opposite. Clean, precise, intellectual, extreme dancing that needs no costume to be brilliant: William Forsythe’s In The Middle, Somewhat Elevated, as taken on by English National Ballet in a rare modern bill at Sadler’s Wells.

The title is diversionary. Middle and high up hangs a pair of golden cherries, over some sort of bleak rehearsal room in which nine dancers prowl lethally in practice clothes, heedless of the shuddering noises all around — cannonfire perhaps, guillotines, wrecking balls. The work had been made for Sylvie Guillem and her crowd, the most arrogantly golden of all generations, the Paris Opera bunch nursed by Nureyev. Forsythe exploited their mastery of ballet’s extreme physicality and theatricality in his 1987 work, which redefined ballet as no other choreographer had since Balanchine.