Geeky boys have already made their mark in Hollywood, with directors such as Wes Anderson and Michel Gondry redeeming their uncool adolescence. Now the geeks are making the running in contemporary dance. These guys – choreography is still a boys’ club – are unashamedly interested in ideas, bringing sleek bodies into conjunction with intellectual speculation. A strand of dance engaged with science and philosophy is emerging: not simply about stories nor about making patterns, but using ideas to extend the possibilities of dance. Sadler’s Wells has become its British base: Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui perform here regularly, as does Wayne McGregor, a leading light of this brainiac tendency.

Technology fiend McGregor is engaged on a continuing investigation into brain and body. The ultimate goal is to create “artificially intelligent, autonomous cho-reographic agents”. In other words, he and his colleagues hope to develop software that can think for itself and help choreographers rethink what they do with the body. It’s a properly Frankenstein-ian project, a collaboration that has included cognitive psychologists and cardiac specialists, as it probes the way the brain’s signals transmute into movement.

As a dancer, McGregor’s performances were utterly distinctive. Shaven-domed and lanky, he possessed an unmatchable, boneless judder. Its default position was an insectoid crouch, from which he would rearrange his limbs in unexpected angles at lightning speed. Imagine a praying mantis put through a particle accelerator and you get something of the effect. For ages, his works for his own Random Dance Company were arresting, but the style always looked best on McGregor himself – few other dancers could embody its sci-fi stylings. Now 38, he no longer takes the stage, and his great leap forward as a choreographer came with Chroma, his thrilling 2006 piece for the Royal Ballet. This exploited the virtuosic extensions of some visibly delighted classical dancers, against a yomping score that blared like a Bond theme. It was that rare thing: a popular ballet hit with brains as big as its balls.

McGregor has since been appointed resident choreographer at the Royal, but returns to his own company, clumsily renamed Wayne McGregor | Random Dance, with Entity, which premiered at Sadler’s Wells before an extended tour. The latest stage in his AI inquiry, it’s a terrific work. In two sections, it asks how the brain imagines movement and how it might reimagine it. (One of McGregor’s dancers at the Royal Ballet said that after working with him “you feel like your brain’s been rewired”.) The investigation discovers a volatility of choreography, in which bodily components speed off in twitchy new directions. As well as keeping its synapses firing, Entity also develops into a great sexy beast of a piece – it’s like being licked by a panther’s juicy, rasping tongue while you’re revising maths.

The evening begins and ends with a grainy Muybridge-like film of a greyhound in perpetual, lolloping motion. It introduces the 10 dedicated dancers, dressed in vests and pants (the programme says each costume is patterned with the dancer’s own DNA fingerprint, but from the circle they just looked like pants). They do not aim to appear weightless, as in classical ballet, nor do they brandish heft and muscle. Their bodies follow the sinew, stretch like elastic – scooting neck, legs attenuated, curves scything along toe and finger. The choreographer’s trade-mark stylings are still here – digits splayed or pointed, spines held tautly convex – and the dancers give them diamond-sharp detail. Everything is delivered with impressive speed and intent, even ferocity: at any moment, you feel, they may stretch out of their skin. In Chroma, it became clear that McGregor’s style could not only stand up to big noise, it was enhanced by it. Entity, too, employs rich, swaggering scores. The first, by Joby Talbot, lets a busy string quartet scratch and scurry over a vocal swell. The second is by the electronica composer Jon Hopkins, a luscious throb and exhalation. This growls and grinds, and the sound of fric-tion draws attention to the dancers’ work – their shearing legs and elbows turning inside out.

Entity may have been conceived in the science lab but the duets seem more overtly sexualised, the relationships more, um, more relationship-like than in previous work. The second part is full of languorous exchanges. Jessica Wright and Anh Ngoc Nguyen have a tender duet, rapt and needy, while other couples perform courtship rituals: knocking foreheads or shaping themselves into alluringly haughty arches. The meatiest sequence in the first part shuffles the six men into complicated conjunctions. It starts with a very sexy duet, full of churn and grapple. Elsewhere, one man bears down on another, neck elongated, chest swollen like a turkey, while the second scooches back on all fours.

McGregor’s creative team is fully engaged with the project – Lucy Carter, his regular lighting designer, always combines conceptual precision with the sheer sensuality of colour. For Entity, the designer Patrick Burnier frames the floor with three screens, meshed like membrane; you think of skin stretched over bone. For the second section, they move above head height to feature projections by the video artist Ravi Deepres, showing shifting patterns and amoebic speckles or a beguiling overlay of algorithms. These also spill over the floor, threatening to upstage the dancers in their inky void licked with dark gold light.

As the staging becomes more diffuse, the score swampier, we must work harder to see the flickering movement. That seems to be part of the point. Out of dedicated endeavour, something galvanic, unpredictable emerges. It’s great to be geeky.

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