‘These guys weren’t really monks but professional dancers, right?’
So asked a smart friend and accidental fellow audience member after Wednesday’s blistering performance of Sutra at Sadler’s Wells – and it was a telling indication of the coup that dancer-choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui pulled off when he created the piece last year.

He has, indeed, effectively transformed these bona fide Shaolin kung-fu monks (based in the monastery in Henan province) into first-rate contemporary dancers. And, by the end of this peerlessly original 70 minutes of cross-cultural dialogue – set to aptly reflective music by Szymon Brzóska – he appears to have become one of them, too.

And that’s what this brave, thrilling, elliptical piece comes across as: Cherkaoui’s miniature odyssey into the mind of a Zen Buddhist, to find out what makes them tick and how they square their pacific beliefs with being such fearsome fighting machines.