Ballet, reduced and raw

In art class we used to draw the negative space around a chair, the better to draw the chair. Sounds daft but it's a sculptural trick - subtract to reveal - and so it is with Chroma. A short ballet choreographed by Wayne McGregor to an arrangement by Joby Talbot, it paints with absences - of white stage and shone light - so we can better experience its dancers, as lone and magnificent as marble casts.

Lit like an exhibit and scored like a film (Talbot's inspiration was the music of the White Stripes), McGregor showcases the human form, exploring its limitations, mining its frailties and approaching the body as an architectural curiosity to electric results.

The dancers - Sarah Lamb, Tamara Rojo, Mara Galeazzi (pictured), Steven McRae, Eric Underwood and Federico Bonelli - are eloquent and urgent, testing and straining against each other or surrendering into supportive, sculptural clinches. It is spare and majestic - and therefore quite bonkers to pair it with the cartoonish and clumsy wartime spectre of Different Drummer, which a different cast of dancers do little to lift.

In contrast, The Rite Of Spring is all about addition. Kenneth MacMillan's confrontational choreography propels a corps of 46 around apocalyptic sets in a display of tribal, feral mass muscle.

It is an impressive movement that ultimately sacrifices the individual. But it is Chroma -less as more, reduced and raw - that will remain ringing triumphant in your ears. Tanis Taylor

Tomorrow and Feb 23, Royal Opera House, Bow Street WC2, 7.30pm, £4 to £55. Tel: 020 7304 4000. www.royaloperahouse.org Tube: Covent Garden

The Royal Ballet: Chroma/Tryst/Symphony In C
Royal Opera House
Floral Street, WC2E 9DD