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Whether such a scene of connubial bliss occurred at the creation of Silent Screen (shown two weeks ago in Salford) is doubtful, but I sense in its anguish and its bewailing moans all the hall-marks of the Lightfoot/Leon canon. There are the dancers who perform wild fits of sign-language, gesturing silent horrors and inner pains; the dancers who as pall-bearers rise up from the orchestral pit like vengeful Furies from the gates of Hell; dancers as Grotesques who writhe in untold agonies, their mouths gurning, their faces contorting into twitches and grimaces, (how often, I thought, they appeared as Lowry’s “stick-men”, a somehow appropriate image given the venue) and of course there are the dancers as interpreters of a Philip Glass score (here “Glassworks” – as previously used by Jerome Robbins, and a section from “The Hours”), which is, as we are wont to say Up North, “all fur coat and no knickers”. Such sentiments might well express my feelings about the work itself in that it is a grand spectacle, but one of artifice and little substance. Dance here is gesture-ridden, declamatory and it belittles the splendid talents of NDT’s dancers, not least of whom is Paul Lightfoot himself, making a very rare stage appearance.

Here is a dancer of exceptional merit, whose smooth and effortless control - the lugubriousness of his motion, the fluidity of movement - speaks of a greater artistry than of the work he is performing. He is at various times poet, mourner, father, Christ and we see in Lightfoot the performer (at the great age of forty-one) the thoroughbred technique and wonderful lyricism that marks out the greatest of dancers.

Also on offer was a 2005 Jiri Kylian work, Toss of a Dice, whose singular effect was one of choreographic anaesthesia. A great metallic pterodactyl hovers over the stage and in its turning it seems to cause a ringing “ping” (like a finger being rubbed around the rim of a crystal glass), which acted as the score. All-the-while the dancers scurried, hurtled, scurried, twitched, scurried, spasmed, hurtled and twitched some more for all of thirty minutes until the audience was cheering on its feet. Always of the few, never the many, I wanted to go home.