Bayadère - The Ninth Life, Shobana Jeyasingh Company, Linbury Studio Theatre

The premise of last night’s world première made so much sense that one almost wondered why nobody had done it before now.

Commissioned by the Royal Opera House and in its downstairs Linbury space, Shobana Jeyasingh, a classically-trained Indian dancer and now director of her own contemporary dance company, would respond to the 19th-century ballet about an Indian temple dancer, La Bayadère, which has wonderful choreography but presents an entirely Western, Orientalist vision of the “exotic” east. Issues of cultural appropriation, objectification and identity would be tackled, dance would get interdisciplinary and hopefully “accessible”: basically, boxes would be ticked upstage, downstage and centre-stage.

That this ambitious vision actually came fairly close to fulfilment is down mainly to two factors: Jeyasingh’s choreography (of which more below), and her splendid use in the piece’s central section of first-hand accounts by French critic and danseophile Théophile Gautier of the first visit to Europe of real Indian temple dancers, in 1838. The relatively long set-up which comes before that, in which a contemporary young British Indian man retells the plot of La Bayadère, is I suppose necessary, but – apart from some touches of gentle humour – is fairly dull, and moreover marred by hideous video projections of a blog post being written.

But then the young man (Sooraj Subramaniam) finds himself absorbed in a dream reenactment of the ballet’s legendary Kingdom of the Shades scene, over which we hear Gautier, in the velvety, Epicurean tones of voice artist Benedict Lloyd-Hughes, marvelling at the animalistic grace and “unimpeachable authenticity” of the “bayadère” Amaty he met in Paris, poring over her physical features (“skin: swarthy, gums: blue, teeth: black”) with an aesthetic fascination very close to sexual obsession.  On stage the dancers enact both the gazing and its violent, invasive subtext: Subramaniam is brilliantly sinuous as the temple dancer on display, graceful, girlish, and impassive, while around him the company’s female dancers are pushed to the ground, flipped over and have their legs pulled apart while Gautier’s voice describes the enormous holes in Amaty’s earlobes. That voice comes from behind us, all around us as we watch, leaving us unavoidably implicated in Gautier’s objectifying, rapacious gaze. It is, as it ought to be, a genuinely disturbing experience.

Jeyasingh’s choreography for these uncomfortable cultural encounters makes clever use of the two traditions involved, classical ballet and classical Indian dance. Most of the company dancers are trained in neither, giving to their interpretation of, for example, the Shades entrance (not the original arabesques, but a balletic Jeyasingh version) the slightly bastardised quality of cultural appropriation. Nothing that is supposed to be either classical Indian or classical ballet looks quite right. Only once Subramaniam is released from his feminised temple dancer persona, returned to his masculine clothing and given control over his own vision does the dance – now straight-up contemporary, the company’s main discpline – start to look fun, confident, and fluent. Jeyasingh’s choreography, and the dancers, come alive once freed from the bonds of storytelling and Gautier’s Orientalist gaze: as imagined by Subramaniam’s character, the Shades scene, a segment of freestanding dance which forms the last quarter or third of the piece, is now punchy, dynamic, multifarious and exhilarating.

Pictured below: the Mariinsky Ballet in La Bayadère

The claim to lack ideology is itself ideological – and the naturalness of “contemporary” dance (now more than a century old) is just as full of specific content as the classical traditions of ballet and Indian dance. But if we leave Laban-esque notions of naturalness aside as unhelpfully implicated (through their admiration of the “noble savage”) in precisely the same cultural imperialism as Gautier, and read Jeyasingh’s final point as something about belonging, then it all slots into place: people are best when allowed both to fully inhabit their inherited identities, whether cultural or discplinary, and to play freely with them.

Being cynical, we could read this as a hurrah for modern liberalism and the triumph of the individual. Being less cynical, we can enjoy it as a good, exciting piece of dance, though I think its impact would have been much stronger had it been rather shorter, a bold shot of “unimpeachable authenticity”, over almost as soon as it had begun. The problem with individualism and freedom from disciplinary constraints is that it can become just a cacophony, too multivocal to keep track of and lacking the unity that would make it memorable. Jeyasingh’s nine dancers in their polyphonous, interlocking, multi-referential series of duets and trios, for all their energy and conviction, don't achieve quite the same magnetic pull of either the Indian dancers seen by Théophile Gautier, or the original entry of the Shades in Petipa’s Bayadère.  But it is an engaging company, whose dancers are good fun to watch, and the piece as a whole - despite entirely unmemorable original music by Gabriel Prokofiev - made quite a strong impression. It's certainly worth catching if you like La Bayadère, the history of Indian dancers in Europe, or Jeyasingh's own confident contemporary dance idiom.

• Bayadère - The Ninth Life is at the Linbury Studio Theatre at the Royal Opera House until 28 March, then touring to Eastleigh, Watford and Exeter in April and May.