LONDON — Seven dancers, their backs to the audience, heads turned in profile, move on to the stage in silence, stepping to the left on a bent leg, then ceremoniously curving the right leg forward. Arms interlinked behind backs, the women in soft draped dresses, they look like ancient figures on a Greek vase. The music begins: not ancient at all, but jagged, abrasive strings. A lone man appears. He is performing the same sequence, but facing forward.

Pam Tanowitz’s “Everyone Keeps Me,” a new work for the Royal Ballet that premiered here on Thursday, has begun, and for 20 entrancing minutes, we are in her strange, resonantly poetic world.

The dance critic Edwin Denby once wrote that “the strange thing about making pieces that have no logical narrative or logical formal structure is that it needs an exceedingly dramatic gift.” He was talking about Merce Cunningham, but that’s true too of Ms. Tanowitz, a choreographer who labored quietly at her craft for decades and now is suddenly in demand everywhere. In the last year, she has created pieces for the New York City Ballet, the Martha Graham Dance Company and the Paul Taylor Company, among others.