Sadler's Wells: the power of dance to shock Those words proved prophetic when it came to the final commission from de Frutos. Well-known as a provocateur, and famous in his youth for dancing nude, de Frutos set out to create a scandal. Taking Jean Cocteau as his starting point, and the music of Ravel's La Valse - rejected by Diaghilev as "not suitable for ballet" - he created a piece called Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez. Nothing you can do today would be scandalous anymore except for annoying the Catholic church. So that is my target. Spalding failed to see the storm clouds coming. When we saw the run-through we didn't think it would cause the controversy that it did. But perhaps no one could have predicted the scenes when the work was premiered on October 14 2009. In front of Katrina Lindsay's priapic pink designs and underneath a neon sign saying "Amuse me!" - one translation of Diaghilev's words to Cocteau - de Frutos had set a horror story with a hunchbacked pope, pregnant nuns and horny priests, mouthing obscenities and performing grotesque acts. The choreography was eloquent, but the piece was vulgar and deliberately offensive. People stormed out, and at the conclusion - where the pope was electrocuted, after one of the nuns had been garrotted with her own rosary - boos filled the auditorium. Javier De Frutos" Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez (Tristram Kenton) In retrospect, Spalding believed that part of the problem was one of expectation; people did not imagine they would witness something so shocking at the conclusion of what was effectively a tribute evening. He felt, however, that the controversy was totally in the spirit of Diaghilev. But the reaction had repercussions. The vehemence of the response took de Frutos aback. The BBC pulled out of broadcasting his segment of the bill in a pre-watershed slot on BBC Four and he received death threats which, he said, "affected my health greatly." "There is no such thing as great art that is safe and appeals to all," Spalding argued. I believe that part of the furore over Javier's work and its ability to shock is that no one realised that a piece of choreography could do this. Most take the view that dance is a rather effete art form that deals only with truth and beauty. The reality is that dance is often disturbing, ugly, confrontational, violent and sometimes sexually explicit. What the row proved categorically, and rather gratifyingly for those who cared about its future, was that dance could still ruffle feathers. It wasn't all pretty girls in tutus, it was, as in Diaghilev's time, worthy of its place at the centre of the cultural debate. With its in-your-face shock tactics, de Frutos's Damnation was also an extreme example of Spalding's belief that part of the function of Sadler's Wells as a commissioning house had to be its willingness to allow creators to experiment - and sometimes to fail. There will always be those pieces that aren't quite as successful as others but if they are done with the right intention and integrity then you will learn as much from them. You have to have faith that everything is going to work but then you have to have the possibility of putting it into perspective when it doesn't and to be mature about that. In the Spirit of Diaghilev represented exactly the creative freedom that Sadler's Wells had been trying to encourage in that it gave all its participants a chance for self-discovery. In the case of Russell Maliphant, it laid the foundation for another astonishing work. His AfterLight (Part One) was inspired by photographs of Nijinsky, by the extreme plasticity of his rounded arms, the way his body seemed to fall into sculptural shapes, and by the spirals that he drew as he descended, at the height of his success with Ballets Russes, into schizophrenia. But it was also informed by the interest in the working of light on stage that Maliphant and the lighting designer Michael Hulls had explored throughout their careers. This was a work that would never have come into being without the initial commission from Sadler's Wells. "You usually wouldn't have the freedom to make a 15-minute piece; to get project funding you have got to make a full evening's work," Maliphant explained. McGregor's award-winning UNDANCE, too, had its distant origins in the In the Spirit of Diaghilev night - though the seed that was planted was from an experiment that did not entirely succeed. As another associate artist Akram Khan had noted in a different context, "the pieces you should hold closest to are the ones you fail with." He was talking about the way that works can be developed with the best intentions and hold great potential, but then go wrong. If you can recognise why that happens, he argued, it helps you to grow as an artist. McGregor agrees. What is a bad piece? Is it bad for the artist, or is it bad for the person watching? A bad piece can actually be the most important piece you make. In making Dyad 1909, a work that was warmly if not ecstatically received, he discovered that the challenge of working with the Wilson twins was that they rarely agreed with each other. They are brilliant and that is interesting for their work when there's just the two of them, but it's quite hard when you're working with five people. The result was that they presented him with a set containing multiple projections, when he expected only one. In a discussion of this, before the premiere, he quoted Merce Cunningham: "When you go out into the countryside and you see a tree, you walk around it. You don't wish it wasn't there. In McGregor's case, the experience of working with film precipitated an interest in its effects on stage. This led to UNDANCE, a bold collaboration with the composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and the artist Mark Wallinger. Wayne McGregor, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Mark Wallinger's 'UNDANCE' (Ravi Deepres) What was unusual about the UNDANCE triumvirate was that they were all artists of equal star-power, pre-eminent in their different fields. Different too, was the way Wallinger took the lead. "I thought if I am going to have any meaningful role in this process, I am going to have to be the instigator in some sense," he said. He presented the group with a little book, like a conceptual artwork in miniature, in which he outlined a group of interwoven thoughts. Turnage, meanwhile, went away and produced his own, entirely separate response to Wallinger's propositions. When the three strands of thought came together on stage in December 2011, it was obvious that a certain alchemy had been at work. The dancers of Random, in flesh-coloured costumes which recalled Eadweard Muybridge's nude figures, enacted a series of action verbs: skipping, throwing, and jumping. Behind them, on a replica of the grid, a film of the same dancers played slightly out of sync; at one point running in the opposite direction to their steps on stage, making them appear to push through time itself. Turnage's stirring score, in eight movements, added to the rich brew. This airily beautiful yet deeply thoughtful piece sprung not only from Spalding's policy of creative commissions, but also from all that had gone before it, not least the films in Dyad 1909. If you look back over the history of dance, this is often how it works. When people talk of Diaghilev commissioning Picasso, it is easy to forget that one of the results was Parade - a silly Cubist sensation, quickly forgotten. When we talk of Balanchine's Apollo, one of the pieces that still dazzles, it is important to remember that in the same 1928 season the Ballets Russes premiered, with equally high hopes, Massine's Ode, which was a flop. In the same way, when Ninette de Valois laid the foundations for the British repertory, she actively advocated deliberately dropping a couple of works at the end of each season to clear the way for novelty. Yet dance makers in modern times are under enormous pressure only to make works that will replicate the success they have had before. Bogged down in funding applications, worried about finding audiences and filling theatres, they can end up frightened to take risks. In promoting a spirit of adventure, advocating imaginative matchmaking between different disciplines, and finding enough money and resilience to ride the disappointing results as well as the successes, Sadler's Wells is making a great contribution to dance in the early 21st century. As critic Luke Jennings remarked: "If anyone can lay claim to the fur-collared overcoat of Sergei Diaghilev, it is probably Alistair Spalding." Sadlers Wells: Dance House by Sarah Crompton (Oberon Books, £25) is available to order from Telegraph Books at £18 + £1.35p&p.