Four world premieres on a single night? No one could accuse Alistair Spalding, the boss at Sadler’s Wells, of thinking small. But then neither did Sergei Diaghilev, whose legendary Ballets Russes (1909-29) is being celebrated in its centenary year. Spalding, though, isn’t interested in revisiting the past; rather he has invited a quartet of choreographers to make something new in the spirit of the great Russian innovator.

Wayne McGregor takes his cue from the science of Diaghilev’s era, so his Dyad 1909 is inspired by Antarctic exploration. Not that this is particularly evident, despite the sound of cracking ice and freezing winds in Olafur Arnalds’s evocative and lyrical score. The grey geometric shapes that inhabit the stage are suggestive of a cold bleak landscape and also useful as screens upon which are projected images of — presumably — a Ford Trimotor, one of which flew over the South Pole in 1929, the year that Diaghilev died. In only 20 years, you see, we went from finding the South Pole to flying over it.

McGregor’s choreography, for seven dancers, bears its trademark of rubbery articulations and energy in a constant state of flux. There are romantic couplings that hint of ecstasy and sequences when the dancers seem to be swimming on dry land, a potent image of futility and exhaustion. It ends with two dancers marooned in a desolate emptiness, walking nowhere. One wishes the movement had striven for greater shape, but the mood convinces.

As an artist who has always been fascinated by the shape of things, Russell Maliphant was bound to find inspiration in the abstract drawings of Nijinsky (Diaghilev’s star dancer). Afterlight, Maliphant’s solo for Daniel Proietto, travels in two concurrent circles, defined by the turning movements of the dancer’s body on the spot and the larger arc he travels onstage. Satie’s Gnossiennes works perfectly as music; Michael Hulls’s lake of dappled lighting is breathtaking.

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui opts for a modern reworking of Nijinsky’s seminal ballet, L’Après-midi d’un faune, using Debussy’s music with gorgeous contributions from Nitin Sawhney. Everything about this Faun (pictured) works spectacularly well, from the knitted musical composition (lushly conducted by Dominic Wheeler) to the exhilarating contrast in the dance between human and bestial sexual awakening. A duet for the exemplary James O’Hara (the faun) and Daisy Phillips (the nymph), it allows their senses to devour each other through dance.

As is his wont, Javier De Frutos sets out to shock and offend with his Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez, a ludicrous piece of violent tosh. A resoundingly vulgar cartoon satire of the Pope and all he represents, it’s a homage to Jean Cocteau (who wrote scenarios for Diaghilev), is set to Ravel (another Ballets Russes composer) and embraces Balanchine’s Apollo. The graphic duets are lurid and sexually abusive, and some may draw the line at seeing a pregnant woman punched in the stomach and garrotted with a rosary. It’s not often you hear boos at the Wells, but these were well deserved.

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