Close-up: Christopher Wheeldon

It can't be easy being told that the future of your art form depends on you. And at first glance, making plotless dances to complicated music by Stravinsky looks like an odd way to rejuvenate ballet as a popular entertainment. Luckily, Christopher Wheeldon is used to coping with pressure.

In the early 1990s, as a teenaged graduate of the Royal Ballet School, the Yeovil-born Wheeldon attended a class at New York City Ballet, only to find himself offered a job by mistake. Soon he was not just dancing for the company, but making some of its most acclaimed new ballets. "I've never had the experience of being able to fail in a safe environment," he says.

Since then, he has been compared to nearly all the dead giants of 20th-century classical choreography, from Balanchine to Ashton. His knack for translating musical phrases on to human bodies, and for seeming to tell a story while never flirting with anything so crass as a plot, gives all his work an instant timelessness. Wheeldon, though, doesn't like "the torch-carrying business. I just try to have fun, making dances, with excellent dancers."

In 2007 – while resident choreographer of the New York City Ballet – he formed a transatlantic troupe, Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company. This autumn, his company makes its second visit to Sadler's Wells, its London home, with a new ballet to Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite.

Wheeldon knows that ballet in the modern world can be a tricky sell. "We use bits of video, or taped autobiographical snatches from the dancers, to make it a friendlier experience. You can hear people exhale as they feel, 'Oh, it's just like watching a film.' Then we hit them with the highest-quality work we can."

Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company is at Sadler's Wells, London EC1, from Wednesday (www.sadlerswells.com)