The Misty Frontier, Linbury Studio, London

When Balanchine met Blanche

Dreaming up creative collaborations that never happened is a game you might try yourself. The playwright Tennessee Williams and choreographer George Balanchine met only briefly at a party in Mexico in 1945, but even a near-miss of two of America's greatest-ever talents trails a tantalising "but what if ... ?". Williams – a keen ballet fan – had just published The Glass Menagerie. Balanchine, six years his senior, already had 20 years as a successful dance-maker behind him. One artist was fixated on narrative. The other on geometric form. Both had a consuming interest in sex. No one knows what they said to each other. But the choreographer Javier De Frutos gets considerable creative mileage from imagining it.

Which isn't to say that the resulting hour-long work – made for six dancers of the Royal Ballet – has anything so obvious as named characters or a plot. You might fancy one of the square-jawed boys as Stanley, or that a tetchy blonde bears a passing resemblance to Blanche. But that's in your head, not the choreographer's. Frutos's approach is oblique and ultimately more effective, using suggestion and atmosphere to cast lines of connection to his heroes. The Misty Frontier is the imaginative hinterland where their influences meet.

Being new to the classical style himself, De Frutos seems somewhat in awe of the pointe shoe. Or perhaps he's projecting the effect on a dance fan of meeting a famous choreographer. Whichever, he gets his three ballerinas to show off their most basic classroom technique, almost in the manner of a demonstration. Low penchés, creamy developpés and smoothly promenaded arabesques spool out as each girl runs the gamut of ballet's formal alphabet. Unadventurous, perhaps. But in the intimate context of the Linbury Studio – where you're aware of every ligament's click – it all seems fresh and alluring.

What gives the ballet its edge is the choice of musical material: an old spoken monologue of Jimmy Nelson's "How to be a ventriloquist". Thus a falsetto voice practising "The boy bought a basketball (you say 'd' but you think 'b')" becomes an amusing rhythmic riff for dancing to. It's also, of course, a neat metaphor for the process of ballet training, demanding patience and grit in the face of the seemingly impossible. And it's a mark of Frutos's learner-status in that world too. The choreographer's own gnomic appearances on stage – at one point beetling on to help hoist a boy dancer's thigh into place, or frowning at a couple whose duet ends in a long kiss – add another layer of biographic interest. Balanchine was famously possessive of his dancers; he married four of them.

j.gilbert@independent.co.uk