When Wayne McGregor got the call from Monica Mason, he wasn't expecting it. After all, people like him don't become resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet. He's too cutting edge, too modern and too much of an outsider. But after his sensational Chroma for Covent Garden in 2006 it was obvious that the sheer energy and stamina of his creative juices could come in handy. Where others saw a bull in a china shop, Royal Ballet director Mason saw a human dynamo filled with an inexhaustible curiosity.

In the dance world, there really is no one quite like McGregor, partly because he has his fingers in so many pies that no one else could begin to compete. He's been running his own contemporary dance troupe, Random, for the past 16 years; for the past two he's been the Royal's chief choreographic catalyst; he spends months working with scientists on research into how the brain functions in relation to the body; in April the Stockport native was appointed the Government's first Youth Dance Champion; he maintains one of the busiest freelance choreographing careers in the world. And he has built his own dance studio and artists' retreat on an island in the Indian Ocean.

“You know me, I'm a man of action,” McGregor says, and no matter how full his diary he looks great on it. At 38, as lean and wiry as ever, he can galvanise a room with his forceful presence, just as he dominated the stage when he was dancing. His body is always on the move, animated by the juxtaposition of vibrant ideas whirling around in his famously hyperactive brain.

The reason we're talking today is that he has a new piece about to be unveiled at the Royal Opera House, a one-act ballet created with the visual artist Julian Opie. It will give audiences a chance to see what being resident choreographer has meant to both McGregor and the company. This was a job he didn't expect, or even seek, but it made sense to him right from the start. “I thought it was a very good signal of intent,” he says. “It was interesting and brave of Monica to do that, and she's really followed through since I've been here.”

As for his detractors, those worried because he wasn't bred by the company, you can forget it. “I just ignore them. I've made work at the Paris Opera, San Francisco Ballet and Stuttgart Ballet, so I'm very familiar with how the ballet world works. I'm familiar with the classical technique even though I didn't train in it; I know how the biomechanics of the body work. All this is rubbish about how my work is going to be dangerous.”

You can see why Covent Garden's dancers would warm to McGregor. They spend most of their careers performing ballets made by dead people and their job satisfaction comes mostly from interpreting roles danced by countless artists before them. Not only are new works rare, but few choreographers take the body to the extremes that McGregor does. His abstract ballets constantly rethink the principles of movement and expose limbs and joints to extraordinary degrees of hyperarticulation. So his dances can often look “other”, like products of some sci-fi universe.

He did not grow up worshipping Giselle; his tastes were formed by watching Rambert. Since he arrived at the Opera House, however, he's been soaking up ballets like crazy. “I'm loving the opportunity to watch different interpretation in roles, which is something you don't get in contemporary dance. I always wondered how people could see Swan Lake three times, but it's been made manifest to me the massive difference an individual can have on the other 70 people on stage and how it can colour your feeling about a ballet.”

His new work for the Royal, Infra, is a pointe shoe ballet, which presumably means it plays to the company's classical strengths more than Chroma did. Created for 12 dancers, and using music (“quite melancholic, quite yearning”) by the German composer Max Richter, Infra has no narrative, though McGregor says “it has signs of life which can be interpreted narratively”. Infra came partly “from thinking about what is under the skull, what happens in the brain. Julian makes iconic signatures of bodies and we have an 18m [59ft] LED screen on which Julian's figures constantly walk and migrate throughout the ballet. It's as if they are above ground and underneath there is this series of multiple narratives in dance, or fragments of narratives. They come from my thoughts on the Tube; I wonder what narratives are going on in people's heads as they travel in these confined spaces. Julian's world is one of external bodies; I'm finding a way of communicating the internal dialogues of the dancers.”

The making of Infra is also the subject of a BBC Two documentary, to be broadcast on November 22, along with a televised performance. “What you will see is me, head down, just working,” McGregor says. “It's not an exposé because I'm not a diva, I don't have big fits.”

What you will see on stage is only a small portion of his Opera House job. “A big part of my residency is finding ways to inspire creativity among young dancers and choreographers in the house. Dance has been very poor about devising structures for its own development.” He's working with young choreographers in a programme that provides them with mentors who can provide feedback when they are creating. “As well, I take 20 young choreographers to see things, to expose them to different inputs. Last night, for example, we went to see Complicite; I took them to the Bacon exhibition; we're going to Antony Gormley's studios.”

McGregor has never made a narrative ballet, certainly not the kind that fuels the Covent Garden box office. “It doesn't particularly interest me in terms of form and relevance. But would I make a three-act story ballet? Well, watch this space.”

Meanwhile, in March he directs the Royal Ballet in a co-production with the Royal Opera, bringing together two Baroque masterpieces, Dido and Aeneas and Acis and Galatea. He's also making two pieces to mark the centenary of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 2009 and in January he's off to San Diego for several months of scientific research that will result in a new piece for Random. “Science is trying to discover how you map the physical choices that dancers and choreographers make in the studio. How do you share movement ideas? What is cognitively happening when you do that?”

This won't be the first time he has used science to feed his art. “Scientists have published papers from the data they have collected from us as experts of kinesthetic intelligence. Is there a danger of science taking over my work? I don't think so. My passion is making things with the body.”

Infra opens at the Royal Opera House (020-7304 4000; www.roh.org.uk) on Nov 13

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