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But happy to report, the evening much exceeded expectation (to use the unused box on my annual assessment).

Voluntaries passed me by as expected. I looked very well danced, but as I don't get this ballet I find it hard to enthuse, even given the obvious talent and commitment that went into it. The problem for me is the music - it really isn't to my taste. To my ears, it starts out as Hammer Frankenstein, then incidental music at a funeral (Elevator to Heaven), then chirpy "it's OK, gone to paradise", then realisation of the awful finality of death, then incidental music ... and reduces the whole piece in my eyes to Angst in a Leotard. Other people love Voluntaries, and I wish I had the emotional range to join them, but not yet. I will try again next Thursday.

The Lesson gripped me more than I expected. I have always thought Choe is a wonderful dancer (her one performance nonchalantly blitzing the yellow girl in Napoli is a happy memory), but last night was the first time I have seen her in a role where the acting was perhaps as important as the dancing. And I thought she showed herself to be a very fine comic actress. Watson was excellent (deranged but self-aware and so scared of himself at the start, becoming deranged and insistent once he had seen the point shoes and his mania took over) but Choe gave a performance of equal clarity. I also liked McGorian with her ever so slightly more sympathetic take on the accomplice.

Then to Infra. As others have said, the title means "below", and the ballet is about the small details of human life. McGregor put it like this in the programme:

"I have attempted to create a series of human intimacies, based from under the skin - prosaic, imperfect and fragile. In this landscape of miniatures that expose the very signs of life, physical empathies and emotional inferences rescue the lost narratives of the population on stage. Infra has become simply about people"

And it is true. Infra is obviously about people. It is a much more emotional and humane work than Chroma, and so I think surpasses it. The movement vocabulary is softer than before, but still is obviously McGregor. The dancers looked fabulous (and makes me think they would look fabulous in Forsythe or Kylian too ...).

Cuthbertson in particular caught my eye. She seems to have an innate ability to convey understandable human emotion in whatever she dances (her Odette on meeting Siegfried was recognisably desperate not to be a swan any more) and she was further highlighted by being the dancer chosen to display the loneliness of the individual in the crowd (a coup de theatre by McGregor - for that one moment only he fills the stage with real people walking by). Underwood had a calendertastic solo. Hamilton looked a McGregor natural and will figure strongly in the voting end of season for "most promising". Paul Kay danced strongly and with charm. Nunez dance with speed and softness (as did Choe) in choreography that allowed for softness as well as speed. And Watson, Benjamin, Galleazi and the rest all did McGregor proud.

I thought the staging and the music complemented the choreography perfectly. The stage was bare, save for an LED dot-matrix 15' off the ground, showing life-size figures walking by - random people on a pavement. The precision with which the walkers' gaits and dress was conveyed by such an approximate medium could almost be called balletic - the power of gesture and suggestion. The dancers below the matrix acted out moments of the flickering interaction referred to by McGregor to a melodic minimalist score (think Nyman or Glass) occasionally replaced by white noise - perhaps representing the fragility of our understanding of the thoughts and wishes of anyone other than ourselves.

There was too much to see at one viewing (often different dances at different part of the stage) and I look forward to returning to see more. When I return I hope to understand more of McGregor's language. As explained above, he was aiming to create "a series of human intimacies, based from under the skin - prosaic, imperfect and fragile". Sometimes I saw this, sometimes not. The fact that at times I did see this gives me hope that with more viewing I will see more, understand more and like even more. But even with the duets I didn't understand, I found the dance, the setting and the music never less than arresting and curiously compelling. Something I cannot honestly say about Voluntaries.