Given the parallel between musical variation and emotional discovery, it’s little wonder choreographers use the former to track the latter. Altering a musical theme by repetition is how we rehearse our lives, trying the same thing in different ways in an attempt to get it right.

Its comedic potential hasn’t been bettered since the film Groundhog Day, which some wag once called the Groundhog Variations, while Bach’s Goldberg Variations — well, scholars pour over them as us lesser mortals reel in awe.

Unfazed by their towering status, choreographer Kim Brandstrup and Royal Ballet principal Tamara Rojo have created a new work set to the Variations. Wisely, they haven’t attempted to match Bach’s compositional ingenuity, but instead show how trying to perfect ourselves forces us to change.

Their means is the ballet studio with seven dancers going through the tensions and resolutions of rehearsal. Rojo is queen bee, with the others her colleagues or possibly re-imagined versions of herself. Royal Ballet dancers Steven McRae and Thomas Whitehead could be courting her or spurning her, while the four contemporary dancers (Clara Barbera, Laura Caldow, Tommy Franzen, Riccardo Meneghini) look like objects of envy.

Structurally, the piece repeats a rehearsal, with the dancers adjusting what they do on each repeat, shifting the story and their moves. They also watch themselves on a TV (video is often used as a choreographic aid), and form intriguing visual echoes, such as Rojo lying down to sleep when Bach composed the Variations for a patron who could not. In another, Steven McRae sits next to pianist Philip Gammon as if taking lessons as the harpsichordist and namesake Johann Gottlieb Goldberg is said to have done from Bach. The composer is everywhere in this subtly high-achieving piece.
Until 26 September. Information: 020 7304 4000, www.roh.org.uk.