The 4 X 4 of the title are four ballet dancers, and four jugglers from the acclaimed Gandini Juggling.

Dance and Juggling are both ephemeral arts. Unlike a painting, which stays on the canvas to be seen again and again, a flying hoop or a beautiful movement is gone as soon as you’ve seen it.

So much for the title, but dancers and jugglers: can it work?

To my surprise, this show turns out to be a brilliant success. Sean Gandini says he has always thought the movement of a juggler has a lot in common with dance, and with this show he proves he has a point.

The two art forms are perceived very differently, but they rely on similar skills – trust, memory, body-positioning and very precise timing, and they are both underpinned by mathematical precision.

The cast of jugglers and dancers show us a momentary journey through time and space which leaves no trace behind it – “like an imaginary architecture,” as Gandini puts it.

Take out the dancers and you would have a great juggling show anyway, but the dancers, although they can’t juggle, (one girl did manage three balls in the air once, to be fair), add a wonderful extra dimension.

They blend so successfully with the flying hoops and clubs and balls, and with the bodies of the four jugglers, that something breathtaking emerges, raising what could otherwise be simply a top rate circus act and a few dance steps, into the realms of art. Dancers show no fear as clubs whistle past their heads; they manipulate balls so that at times there seem to be eight jugglers.

They dance in and around the action, taking part in it, sometimes appearing as an extra pair of hands or legs.

Hoops miraculously fly onto their extended limbs.

But this juggling is far more than unbelievably clever tricks. The flying objects, like the dance, made by Royal Ballet artist Ludovic Ondiviela, seem to be choreographed to illustrate visually the ravishing string music of Nimrod Borenstein.

The airborne objects group into highly organised mathematical patterns, flying and re-assembling like the components of an abstract painting sprung to life.

The dancers told me they rehearsed for six months to get the split-second timing right, and the result is not an artificial blend of two very different performance arts, but, rather, a whole new stage experience.