American Ballet Theatre brought a delightful sparkle to Sadler's Wells

When the American Ballet Theatre troupe came to Sadler's Wells last month, it was an event - the first time that the national dance company of the United States had visited London for more than 17 years. Since its founding in 1940, ABT has made a virtue of mingling the classical with the modern, the avant-garde with the populist. In its opening season alone, the company hired, with extraordinary chutzpah, nine choreographers; they included Bronislava Nijinska, Michel Fokine and Antony Tudor. At the other end of the spectrum, Sir Anton Dolin oversaw classical and Romantic repertoire such as Giselle and Swan Lake.

In the 1980s the company was run by Mikhail Baryshnikov, now famous - justly or not - for playing the self-obsessed rat of a boyfriend Carrie Bradshaw dumps in the last-ever episode of Sex and the City. Its current artistic director is the former dancer Kevin McKenzie and, nearly 70 years after its foundation, ABT still has at its heart that mixture of the cool and the classical with which it began, a principle reflected in its three programmes at Sadler's Wells, which combined Swan Lake with Twyla Tharp, and Jerome Robbins with La Bayadère.

It was with an act from this latter ballet, choreo graphed by Natalia Makarova after Marius Petipa, that ABT opened its second evening in town. The grands ballets can often create a hallucinatory effect: the Mariinsky corps de ballet in, say, Swan Lake, can seem like a single dancer infinitely refracted. In La Bayadère, in the so-called Kingdom of the Shades scene - like with Swan Lake and Giselle, which are also dominated by an ethereal, white-clad, spectral crowd of girls - the hallucination is literal.

In a marvellously exotic plot even by ballet standards, the story so far is this: Solor, an Indian warrior fresh from slaying a tiger, meets Nikiya, a beautiful temple dancer (the bayadère of the title). They fall in love, but then, in a moment of (extreme) forgetfulness, Solor agrees to marry the Rajah's daughter. Nikiya, poor girl, has to dance for the betrothed couple, but is given a basket of flowers in which is concealed a snake, which kills her with its venom. (Murder/suicide weapons for virginal beauties in the ballet include a needle in Sleeping Beauty and, sometimes, a sword in Giselle; I don't think we need appeal to Vienna to divine their significance.)

In the following scene, the unhappy Solor, racked by guilt and love, takes to his opium pipe - and hallucinates Nikiya, accompanied by a startlingly large number of white-tutu-clad "shades". The Kingdom of the Shades scene is thus a drug-fuelled fantasy in which Solor's chemical-raddled perception becomes our own. One of the greatest (and trippiest) moments in ballet occurs when, at the start of the scene, the corps emerge one by one from a ramp at the back of the stage, painstakingly slowly and elegantly, stepping and arching into arabesques. At its best, it is a sequence capable of pretty much hypnotising an entire audience.

That, alas, was not quite the case with ABT. Irina Dvorovenko's Nikiya, with her white face, coal-black eyes and pink cheeks, looked like a china doll - and also danced like one, never quite coming alive in the role, bringing to it a sort of porcelain sang-froid rather than any fluid charm or poignancy. Maxim Beloserkovsky as Solor was more convincing, but he never quite flew.

But after that uncomfortable start, the company showed their true colours in Mark Morris's Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes. If Bayadère seemed to sit unhappily with the company, the opposite was true of the Morris work, created for ABT in 1987-88. It seemed to emerge from their limbs as naturally as walking.

The work is set to a series of piano études by Virgil Thomson including "For the Weaker Fingers", "Pivoting on the Thumb" and "Oscillating Arm". The steps are so musical, they seem intrinsically part of the score: not just a visuali sation of the music, but an extension of it. This is a piece full of joy and brisk delight. You could imagine waking up to it every morning and spending the rest of the day with a spring in your step. Rippling runs and glissandi from the piano, positioned centre-stage, are reimagined as human gestures with a sort of glorious inevitability. The piece comes with in-jokes - a cheeky Merce Cunningham quote here, a Balanchine reference there - but you don't need to understand them to be charmed by the work.

Finally came a just crowd-pleaser in Jerome Robbins's Fancy Free - a half-hour of dance theatre as perfect and complete as you can imagine, and so popular that Leonard Bernstein, who composed the piece, expanded it into the musical comedy On the Town (Jude Kelly's hit production of which returns to English National Opera next month). It is extraordinary that this cheerful, jewel-like, utterly fresh piece was premièred by ABT in 1944. With its blend of naturalism, humour and virtuosity, it seems completely modern. The storytelling is as crisp and economical as can be. Three sailors on shore leave hang out at a bar in New York City. They are gum-chewing, insouciant toughs eager for a bit of skirt and they find it - up to a point. Here, ballet bracingly met Broadway: a pure delight.

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