Given that Wayne McGregor’s Chroma for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden two years ago caused a sensation like an invasion from another stylistic world - and Monica Mason appointed him resident choreographer on the strength of its eclat - expectations were obviously high for the premiere of his newest creation, Infra. Yet again, the company’s superlatively versatile dancers rose to the challenge of McGregor’s e x t r e m e p h y s i c a l demands, triumphed in them and, at the curtain calls, looked pleased as Punch to be part of it all.

Visually, Infra is a contrast to Chroma, which, in design, was a wash of colour. Now, we have a monochrome environment, the stage depth a black void but for pools or bands of light to set off the dancers. Up above, the artist Julian Opie’s set installation is a full-width electronic screen, across which white-outline stick figures with circles for heads are walking, as on a bridge. “Unreal City. .. A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,” is quoted from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land in the programme. The point of these figures is their anonymity, but I found them a distraction - that anonymity undermined because there is a finite number of “types” and you notice and look out for the man with the briefcase, the woman on teetering heels, at each reappearance.

Choreographically, too, McGregor goes in for overload. In one passage, he deploys all 12 of his dancers in six simultaneous duets, which look stunning, but are impossible to follow. The severe stretches, contortions, dislocations, interlockings, clutches and ripplings of one pas de deux after another are mind-boggling and done at speed. You marvel at what these bodies can be put through and survive: especially the super-supple Edward Watson, who makes impossible shapes for a person with bones.

What the stage action is intending to express is the private emotions, relationships and secret stories unperceived in the crowd above. This, I find, is mostly one note - angst – as that is the natural level of McGregor’s vocabulary and, therefore,its constraint.

And it makes for sameness. Only one duet reaches tenderness before it goes wrong and the couple split. As the electronic figures multiply (rush hour), a horde of walkers-on pass over the stage, swallowing up most of the dancers - but Lauren Cuthbertson is left alone, desolate, weeping. This is effective and affecting. The aural setting, by the composer Max Richter, is a jumble of pings, crackles and voices over music that is otherworldly to the point of being soporific. With Leanne Benjamin, the young Melissa Hamilton, Eric Underwood and Ricardo Cervera outstanding in an excellent cast, Infra is thrilling viewing - with the reservation that it doesn’t fully hang together.

I must admonish McGregor for his perversity in cramming one duet so far into the wings on the left that it is completely invisible to all those (like myself) sitting on that side, where the horseshoe auditorium narrows. The resident choreographer should know the opera house’s sight lines and work to them, for the benefit of his entireaudience.

This programme opens with Glen Tetley’s soaring, yearning Voluntaries (to Poulenc’s organ concerto), which the company dances exultantly; a n d F l e m m i n g Flindt’s Ionesco-inspired The Lesson, with its spine-tingling effects, in which Johan Kob-borg just has the edge over Watson in gripping portrayals of the serial murderer ballet teacher.

More spookiness at Sadler’s Wells, with the return after five years of Ushio Amagatsu’s all-male Butoh dance troupe, Sankai Juku. They o p e n e d w i t h a recent recreation of their early spectacle (from 1978), Kinkan Shonen – Kumquat Seed – with which they first startled the UK in Edinburgh long ago. This set their trademarks: shaven heads, white-paintedbodies, faces impassive except when mouths gape open, extremely slow motion. When these zombie-like creatures embark on a crossing of the stage, you know you could boil an egg before they reach the other side.

To the six dancers, add the live peacock (representing “the vanity of nature”), which, after scrutinising the audience, pecks away contentedly at a pile of seed and remains placidly sane. The piece is a boy’s dream about life and death, we’re told. Well, okay. What powers it is the supreme control of these dancers, their hypnotic concentration and coordination. At times, they move like (barely) living sculptures. At the close, one near-naked man hangs by his feet, as if a carcass on a butcher’s hook, slowly revolving – but he gleams purest white, like polished alabaster. The cast fade away, swathed and gently waving to us, like mummies returning to the tomb. The show is a long haul, but the performers command attention; as these death figures take their ritualised, impersonal bows, you feel an incongruous surge of affection for them.

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