The best place to watch Nowhere And Everywhere at the Same Time is on your feet. Standing up means you look down on the dozens, possibly hundreds of thread-and-weight pendulums hung from the soaring roof to the inky floor of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.

The shiny cone weights graze the ground and catch the fading sun, winking at you like dead stars whose light lives on. The dancers set the threads in delicate motion, and move between this airy armature without touching it and without the threads touching each other.

Nowhere and Everywhere is a large choreographic installation by the American-born, Germany-based William Forsythe. It is an abstract work, with the audience sitting or walking around this forest of time which takes up roughly one-third of the Turbine Hall.

The piece has no beginning, middle or end and it’s not really about anything other than the kinetic and metaphoric potential, as the programme puts it, of bodies in motion. However, the sense of being above the stars and out of time is potent, especially with Tom Willem’s astral‑smash soundtrack, and the strange sway of the pendulums.

The 16 dancers move in signature Forsythe, with flexions and isolations fracturing and dislocating their form. It is anonymous and asymmetric, with some of it floor-based, some of it swift, and some of it grouped. Much of the choreography must be improvised, or at least variable, as the pendulums sway with a momentum that is difficult to predict.

Forsythe has a reputation as a flinty-hearted avant garde-ist, whose work has as much charm as an industrial estate. In fact, as this season of his work shows, he is profoundly humane. Our inner ears catch the life-affirming appeal of motion, and our eyes look to the stars. In Nowhere and Everywhere, Forsythe conflates the heaven’s allure and our physical senses.

Focus on Forsythe until 10 May (0844 412 4300, www.sadlerswells.com).