This year being the centenary of the first performances by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which redefined the art of ballet — and, with it, music and design — for the 20th century, dance companies around the world have been mounting revivals of historic works or latching on to relevant themes for reinterpretations and new experiments for the 21st century.

Sadler’s Wells’s contribution was last week’s special programme, In the Spirit of Diaghilev, for which Alistair Spalding, who runs the theatre, commissioned four British-based contemporary choreographers who are associate artists of the Wells — Wayne McGregor, Russell Maliphant, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Javier de Frutos — to create new pieces inspired by the Diaghilev ethos of collaboration. As a sort of motto for the event, he took Diaghilev’s famous instruction to Jean Cocteau, one of his artistic colla­borators: “Etonne-moi.” Spalding translates this as “Surprise me”, but this sounds a little mundane. Surely “astonish” was what the ever-adventurous Russian had in mind.

McGregor tells us that Dyad 1909, his London piece, will be half of a diptych, because he held a similar commission for Melbourne, to be titled Dyad 1929 (that being the year of Diaghilev’s death and the collapse of his great company). He views the Ballets Russes as emblematic of its time: a period of discovery and technological advancement. (McGregor, as we know, is very technologically minded.) His starting point at the Wells was a parallel centenary, that of the explorer Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition to the Antarctic.

Hence, I presume, the first thing we see on stage: a figure muffled up in protective clothing, hooded head bowed, like a creature of ice and snow, which then slumps into darkness. There are noises in the music, a new score from the Icelandic composer Olafur Arnalds, that suggest ice cracking before we move on to more melodic tones for piano and strings; and among a series of variegated projections shown on screen panels is a view of a house in a snow field. Apart from these, I discerned no further reference or relevance to the South Polar achievement.

McGregor’s choreography for his seven dancers has all his characteristics: the fluid, sinuous ripples through the body, disjointed moves, the feeling that limbs operate independently, with separate brains. In one duet, rather amusingly, the woman's movements seem to take her partner by surprise — which he registers as part of the dance. There are many comings, goings, couplings, sometimes a mass of activity; but, at the end, one pair are walking on the spot, in a stylised way, as if meeting an invisible obstacle. Why are some of the dancers in black masks with Swarovski embellishments? Why are there machines in the film component, by Jane and Louise Wilson? It’s that business of “colla­boration”, you see. Fittingly, McGregor dedicates Dyad 1909 to the memory of Merce Cunningham, whose view and practice of collaboration was that dance, music and design coexist in performance time and space, but otherwise are separate entities.

Maliphant’s inspiration for his piece, AfterLight, was the celebrated dancer of the Ballets Russes, Vaslav Nijinsky: the sense of instinctive sculptural plastique in the many wonderful studio photographs from his dancing, and sane, years; and the flow of movement and energy in his geometric drawings and paintings, based on arcs and circles, from his dark period of insanity. Maliphant’s regular collaborator and co-creator, the lighting wizard Michael Hulls, shapes dancers’ bodies as mobile sculptures.

AfterLight is a sustained solo for the fine dancer Daniel Proietto, who moves with a wonderful fluidity. He revolves on a spot in a pool of light, his arms making all those arcs and circles; he turns like a spiral; the arms reach up, or spread; hand trails behind head. Everything is a continuous flow. Then, on his knees, he is circling round the stage, scooping the air, whirling ever faster. He seems to carve his own shape out of the darkness. Untypically, Maliphant has used a classical score, Satie’s limpid, otherworldly Gnossiennes, and all the elements fit together in a superb piece.

Cherkaoui’s Faun also has an obvious link to Nijinsky — he having created the controversial original. This new piece, a duet for James O’Hara and Daisy Phillips, is a similar exploration of our animal nature, and full of kinetic interest. The slitherings and stretchings, wrap-rounds and coalescings are clearly a mating ritual, the dancers’ bodies locking together as one. But Debussy’s music should have been quite sufficient; an extra input by Nitin Sawhney adds nothing.

We end on a sour note: de Frutos’s Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez, a “satirical ballet” (he says) inspired by scenarios of Cocteau. For what he doesn’t say, but certainly not for the Ballets Russes. Cocteau had a pornographic side, which de Frutos explores with relish in an extended charade about a fertility rite. This ghastly orgy — it is little else — dominated by a hobbling, deformed pope, involves six dancers in rape, all varieties of copulation, a gory murder, general rampaging and endless screaming.

The noise sabotages a fine account from the orchestra, under Dominic Wheeler, of Ravel’s heady, eruptive La Valse. It is a travesty, and calls into question the idea of collaboration. Not surprisingly, many people booed. I think Diaghilev, a man of fastidious tastes and respect for music, would have been not so much astonished as revolted.

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