Russell Maliphant: Is that Sylvie Guillem twiddling her thumbs in the corner?

With only days to go, Russell Maliphant's first work for the Royal Ballet is still up in the air. But no one's very worried, finds Jenny Gilbert

It's Paddington Station along the top corridor of the Royal Ballet's rehearsal block. With little over a week to go before the opening night of three world premieres, studio time is metered by the minute. Press your nose to one glass door and there's the choreographer Wayne McGregor marshalling teeming forces in a vast bright gym. Guest-star Adam Cooper dashes past, checking his watch like the white rabbit, to rehearse William Tuckett's new duet for him and Zenaida Yanowsky. In the studio ahead, though, an odd hiatus reigns. Two people peer silently into videocams and another sits stroking his chin, staring at empty space. A second trio in the corner (it's Sylvie Guillem, flanked by television's "ballet boyz", Billy Trevitt and Michael Nunn) sit hunched around a screen analysing their performance on tape. So can we assume Russell Maliphant's first commission for the Royal Ballet is all done and dusted? Far from it, but no one seems very worried.

Only 10 days to lift-off and the choreography is still in flux, the music is "under discussion" and Michael Hulls' lighting design (as crucial an element in Maliphant's work as the dancers) is still in Michael Hulls' head. Sylvie Guillem has just been told that "another 30 seconds" may be cut from her solo, painstakingly worked over the past five weeks. Yet no one doubts for a minute that these things will all come together, that Maliphant will work his usual magic, and that by Wednesday will have produced 26 minutes of the kind of dance that has had critics scrabbling for the headiest praise they know. Previous works have been called "sublime" and "magnetic", Maliphant himself "a melodist of the body". For years he set his creations on himself and his own small company, but more recently his sinuous male-on-male duets have been the mainstay of Nunn and Trevitt's repertory with their company George Piper Dances. The pair are particularly sanguine about Maliphant's reluctance to be hurried. "That's just how Russell is," says Nunn. "We all just have to trust him."

Like the ballet boyz, Maliphant, now 42, is a Royal Ballet renegade who trained with the company and then quit. Unlike them, though, he didn't stay long enough to scale the heights as a classical dancer. He left the Royal 15 years ago, "aware of so many other possibilities, so many sculptural possibilities beyond the courtly shapes of ballet." He became an early member of DV8, then cut free and began the long, slow haul as an independent.

Throughout the 1990s he paid his dues on the fringe, absorbing a wide range of influences, from capoeira to yoga and t'ai chi. He survived financially by qualifying as a teacher of Rolfing - a therapy that looks at the body and its proper alignment. But increasingly he found that Rolfing also fed him useful ideas "such as how energy might flow in a body. Whether it's a body that's sitting and standing and working at a computer, or whether it's a body that's turning upside down and twisting and falling, the same principles apply."

Initially he worked hard at getting the ballet out of his own system, because he found it limiting as a habitual response. He later stopped doing capoeira for the same reason. "Any developed art from is very distinctive," he reasons. "What I wanted was to use that information in a different context." Part of what makes his own work distinctive (and perhaps surprising to find being courted by the Royal Ballet), is its use of pedestrian movement: simple walking and standing and extending an arm the way a person does to open a door. "There are things in my choreography that almost anyone can do," Maliphant says happily. "But there are also incredibly hard things that almost no one can do. And I'd hope there is something about the relationship between the people in my pieces that's more important than technique. There is a trust between them - there has to be, given what they're asked to do."

Snapping into rehearsal mode again, he calls over the dancers to run a section through. For the moment, they must imagine Barry Adamson's ambient music (the composer who did The Beach) because "Barry wants to do make some fairly big changes" (ah, more of those). But as the dancers swing into action and connect like the mechanism of a watch, the apparent casualness of these announcements is put in context.

As Trevitt tosses Guillem's body to Nunn with the deftness of a Canadian logger, precision becomes the rule they live or die by. Maliphant the technician may know the bio-mechanics of every move - whether it's using sheering force or torsion. But ultimately it's only the dancers' trust in him that makes them risk their necks. The piece is not called "Broken Fall" for nothing.

The Royal Ballet's Mixed Programme: Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020 7304 4000), Wed & Thur, 9, 11 and 12 December