The Rodin Project, Sadler's Wells, review Russell Maliphant is a choreographer who, as he seeks perfection, continues to change his works long after they have been premiered. So the version of The Rodin Project at Sadler's Wells this week was considerably different from the one unveiled in February - and it's getting better all the time. It is inspired by the work of the sculptor August Rodin and, like variations on a theme, it plays with that idea in many ways. In the short first act, Es Devlin's set is covered with swathes of drapery and Michael Hulls's rich lighting turns the six dancers into living sculptures, their bodies twisting into poses recognisable from statues and drawings. They make you think of athletes, or graces, their heads flexing, muscles rippling as they raise their arms in repetitive rhythmic patterns. But as the lighting bathes their turning forms in green and violet, highlighting the shapes they create in orange and gold, the dancers also become aspects of Rodin's personality and life. At one moment, it is as if the three men seek to mould the bodies of the women who are their models; at another, it is the women who watch as a spotlight falls on a writhing man. In the second half, the mood changes. Now the dancers, in modern clothes, perform on bare platforms, moving across them with weightless speed or forming chiselled groups. There are two moments of breathtaking loveliness. In one, the almost naked Carys Staton performs a yearning solo, full of sadness as well as sensuous beauty. In the other, Tommy Franzén and Dickson Mbi, falling down and rearing up the wall at the back of the set, recall the figures tumbling down Rodin's The Gates of Hell, but also raise questions about the nature of movement, as they unfurl their bodies like molten bronze, seeming to defy gravity with their mixture of suppleness and strength. Throughout the work, Maliphant is playing with contrasts: with those inherent in sculpture itself where soft flesh is captured in hard stone and metal, with the appositions between weight and weightlessness, the fluid and the fixed. Like The Thinker, he makes thought visible. It is that density that makes me admire The Rodin Project so much. It is not yet perfect - I find Alexander Zekke's score over-emphatic, and sections of movement are not as sharply synchronised as they need to be - but it still provides some of the most beautiful images and profound ideas I've experienced in dance this year. Until tonight.