For some reason, Ohad Naharin, the director-choreographer of Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, has given the name “gaga” to his movement language. In the sense that first springs to mind, it is anything but. The dance in Three, seen at Sadler’s Wells last week, is built on rigour, discipline and stamina, even when it appears a free-for-all.

The 17 dancers wear mixed-bag costumes of tops and knee-length pants; the decor is plain grey panels against black. To Bach’s Goldberg Variations, for the opening, Bellus, we have skittery jumps, mime gestures, stamping runs with shaking jowls, splayed falls into broken-leg poses and a witty duet in which moves lead to seemingly accidental contacts.

Naharin, appearing as a talking head on a television set, gives amusing linking commentaries. The middle part, Humus, is for nine women, shifting round the stage in a taut, unified group, be they slow-walking with a shoulder shimmy, marching holding their noses or slapping breasts, running on the spot or pivoting on their bottoms. The rhythm is all in their footsteps or tongue clicks, the synchronisation compelling — it receives no cues from the occasional faint plop of Brian Eno’s almost subliminal music.

Finally, in Secus (to a musical medley), come nervy eruptions, a wryly romantic male duet with a Latin-American flavour, then a parade in which the cast line up in rows to try out, in succession, moves they might have thought up on the spot — all done with intense seriousness, even to the lowering of pants for a pubic-hair exhibition, the men obliterating their pudenda by some arcane trick. Then an exuberant finale, and audience acclaim to match. No cause to bother what it had all been about.

Also at the Wells, the Mariinsky Ballet closed its season with a mostly Balanchine programme, for one performance of which the maestro Valery Gergiev conducted Stravinsky’s Apollo (shimmery, if slow) and Prokofiev’s The Prodigal Son (rumbustiously full-blooded). He held the final chord of both longer than anyone else does, for which the audience couldn’t care tuppence, applauding — as usual — as soon as the curtain crept down.

Igor Zelensky was the top star as Apollo: elegant, still airy in jumps, but looking faintly preoccupied. The Prodigal Son feels rather a drag, but Mikhail Lobukhin is thrillingly tearaway, movingly penitent, convincing where Eka-terina Kondaurova’s steely but less than seductive Siren isn’t.

Balanchine’s bravura Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux gave us Olesya Novikova and Vladimir Shklyarov, looking impossibly young, in a dazzling performance of blithe brilliance. What a treat — which I couldn’t say about Alexei Ratmansky’s Middle Duet, where what was missing was its point.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010