Nederlands Dans Theater 1, Sadler's Wells Theatre, London

On a world scale of pulchritude, Nederlands Dans Theater 1 (the core of a three-pronged institution) must rank near the top of the dance division. Contrary to the many modern companies that extol individuality and enlist untidily real, differently shaped people, NDT represents the body as ideal, gleaming with a uniform, creamy perfection.

It is dance as if reproduced by a fashion photographer, dance as glamorously iconic, a premise that underlies the opening piece of London's triple bill, Bella Figura, by NDT's former director Jiri Kylian. Concerned (apparently) with the beauty, illusion and unreality that preoccupies performers, Bella Figura is quintessential Kylian. His big, assertive and lean configurations appear all the more lucid against the sombre emptiness of the stage. Some passages are quirkier than others, exposing the splayed limbs and sharp angles that lie under the smooth surface fluency of the rest. At the end, the succession of pas de deux conveys almost a holy solemnity, moving in a slow trance to part of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater. When the music stops and the final couple continues in a silence broken only by the faint guttering of flaming torches, the effect is sensational.

This is a riveting dance aesthetic, enhanced by spectacular design that uses only moving black curtains (and torches) as décor, and, at one point, dresses the nine bare-chested women and men in crinolines, splashing scarlet silk in the darkness. Faced with this, it seems churlish to criticise Kylian's cavalier way of slicing up different composers, or to rail at his hermetically oblique themes. You have to accept it's the house style.

Johan Inger's Walking Mad is deliberately enigmatic, a surreal comic-strip of frantic dancers, startling events and mobile wall. Two familiar (if not hackneyed) scores – Ravel's Boléro, followed by Arvo Pärt's Für Alina – become aural background, dance and music travelling along separate parallel roads in a refreshingly unexpected way. Unlike most treatments of Boléro, the eroticism is sublimated, even though it clearly motors the performers' chases and duets. The dancers get a real chance to show their dramatic flair, from the burlesque to the poignant, and Walking Mad is the star of the evening.

Inger's visual tricks and crazy metaphors resemble the work of the Swedish choreographer Mats Ek, as does his dance language, its directness reaching to the essentials of being human. This is no surprise, since Inger is also Swedish, and after an exceptionally fruitful NDT decade as dancer and choreographer, he succeeds Ek as director of the Cullberg Ballet in Stockholm.

Inger may be wacky, but Paul Lightfoot is bewildering. Like his other pieces, Speak for Yourself begins with the letter "s" and ends with a host of unanswered questions. I want to know why smoke is billowing out of a man and why rain then floods the stage. It may be that there's no smoke without fire, and that fire needs water to put it out. But that's not enough, especially with dance that doesn't avoid monotony.

To 22 June (020-7863 8000)