Wayne McGregor has been passionate about science for a long time now. In particular he has been fascinated by the links between what is going on in the brain when the body dances. Could human movement be scientifically meaningful? Could science, via a specialised computer-programme, contribute to choreography. Entity, which lasts a full hour, is his latest excursion into this uncharted territory, but while McGregors’ approach to creation is intellectual, what we see on the stage is full of physical excitement – a work of strangely twisted limbs forced into unexpected angles, of relationships between the dancers powerfully implied, even though nothing happens between them in what is basically an abstract piece.

The music for the first part of this work is by Joby Talbot. After a thunderous opening, it settles into a quartet with the cello to the fore, the sound going through almost agonised contortions as the dancers’ bodies distort, hips protruding sideways, pelvis moving in snake-like convulsions. There is a slow and beautiful male duet; there are dances for the company’s five men, full of unexpected positions, and a long series of dances featuring different combinations of the men and the three women, who at one point perform a tangled trio on their own.

Later, we move to an electronic soundscape created by John Hopkins, while behind the dancers we see Ravi Deepres’ projections of mathematical equations, geometrical forms, representations perhaps of spinning molecules, and the Fibonacci Sequence. These flash over the screens too fast to be taken in fully, but they emphasise that, while something purely physical is happening on the stage, there is a whole raft of scientific information linked in some way with what we are watching.

Gradually we become familiar with the looks and style of the individual dancers, and the work becomes less abstract as we respond to their personalities. They are no longer simply cyphers in a scientific experiment conducted by McGregor, but real human beings manipulated by the extraordinary choreography. This also loosens up as the work progresses, and as viewers we begin to relax with the work, even though there is tension up to the final steps.

The whole piece begins and ends with a projection of a greyhound seemingly running on the spot against a graduated background, so that its motion can be studied – a metaphor for the fact that behind every movement of perceived beauty lies a scientific explanation. But when all is said and done, it’s the beauty of the finished result that moves us, not an analysis of how it was achieved. And that is true of McGregor’s amazing dances – groundbreaking, often awkward, but beautiful in a way we have never seen before.