No one could accuse Martin Creed of a lack of confidence as an artist. In 2001 he won the Turner Prize for No 227, the lights going on and off, an installation in which the title said it all. And now here he is boasting of his first ballet, or more accurately, Ballet, Work No 1020. Admittedly it was presented in the studio theatre at Sadler’s Wells as part of Frieze, the trendy art fair, and as such was more a pièce d’occasion than a true “venture into dance”. It was also, perhaps inevitably, more about Creed himself than the new art form he was choosing to taste.

Part dance, part rock gig, part film installation and stand-up comedy, it unfolded over the course of 75 minutes with the rambling ambience of an improvisatory performance. Indeed, there were moments when Creed seemed to be making it up as he went along, so long did it take him to decide what to do next.

He fronted a four-piece band, singing and playing lead guitar (he’s no newcomer to the art rock ethos, having formed a band in the 1990s); when he wasn’t playing he was compèring with his deadpan wit and telling the six good-natured dancers which of the pre-arranged movement sequences he wanted them to perform. The choreography was basic (as it would have to be) and composed of core ballet steps that travelled back and forth across the stage with the precision of a metronome, though the repetitions and mathematical sequencing must have been a challenge to the co-ordination. The lyrics were even more minimalist and repetitive (one song was devoted to singing the phonetics of the alphabet, another was entitled Blow and Suck).

Creed wasn’t embarrassed to revisit his old songs or his old art works (the video of his mismatched canine stars Orson and Sparky is still hilarious) or let loose the odd monologue highlighting his own incompetence. And if it’s sage advice you wanted, he had that too (“If you’re feeling bad and your thoughts are sad, pass them on to someone else”). If all this sounds rather slight for a night out, that’s because it was. But Creed’s salvation is his sense of humour — witness the film of an erection with its unexpected punchline — and the fact that a sense of fun seems to have been transmitted to his dancers. And a word of praise for his fine trio of musicians: Karen Hutt on drums, Keiko Owada on bass and Genevieve Murphy on piano.

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