Nina Ananiashvili and The Moscow Dance Theatre, Sadler's Wells

Dim choreography obscures well-intentioned vanity work

Be wary of ballerina vanity projects, however well-intentioned. Nina Ananiashvili, a star of the Bolshoi, hopes to show a wider range of work than she can dance with her home company. She has live music and new, or newish, ballets. The first of two programmes at Sadler's Wells was a sorry mix of hasty dancing and dim choreography.

This isn't quite a Nina And Friends show. Moscow Dance Theatre is an independent company, co-founded by Ananiashvili and Alexei Fadeyechev, a former Bolshoi director, to create contemporary work.

Whatever Ananiashvili's ambitions, her new work is ill-chosen. Stanton Welch's "Green" starts as a back-to-front rip-off of George Balanchine's "Serenade". Girls in long ballet skirts face away from the audience, then raise their arms in unison.

It's a terrible ballet, but Ananiashvili has some grandeur left; there's a bold sweep to the line of her legs and waist. Her company are a little more polished in Trey McIntire's "Second Before the Ground", set to taped and vaguely African music by the Kronos Quartet. McIntire made the piece for Houston Ballet; what made Fadeyechev think it worth acquiring? Lali Kandelaki and Inna Petrova skip with grim precision, but this doesn't give them much to do.

At least "Leah" was made for this company. Its choreographer, Alexei Ratmansky, has just been appointed director of the Bolshoi. This should have been a strong role for Ananiashvili, who called it her "modern Giselle". It's dull; neither the classical steps nor the modernist plunging have much bite.