Performer: Nina Goldman

Choreographer Arthur Pita’s production of The Metamorphosis – I hesitate to call it a ballet, for it is much more than that – is an eerie, thrilling and wonderfully collaborative piece of dance, led most assuredly and most grotesquely by Royal Ballet principal Edward Watson, here touring to the Joyce Theater, New York.

Edward Watson does angst expertly. The Royal Ballet principal proved himself as a convincing drug-ridden, suicidal Crown Prince Rupert in MacMillan’s ballet Mayerling and he was a nervy, jittery bespectacled White Rabbit in Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Now he’s a bug and literally climbing the walls.