Australian Ballet, Sadler’s Wells, London

With the centenary of the Ballets Russes coming up next May, the dance calendar will soon be wall-to-wall with Diaghilev tributes. Cannily, Australian Ballet has got in early with a bill that pairs a forgotten symphonic ballet by Diaghilev protégé Leonide Massine with an Aboriginal take on The Rite of Spring. Big Russian music plus big ideas ought to have guaranteed a certain fizz. Yet at Sadler's Wells this programme came out as flat as Foster's from a leaky can.

I badly wanted to like this Rite, knowing a bit about the politics behind it. Though modern Australia's collective guilt over the fate of its indigenous people is hardly a thing that can be expiated in a piece of dance, a joint venture between Australian Ballet and Bangarra, a dance company that draws on Aboriginal culture, can only be a good thing, can't it?

To my mind, choreographer Stephen Page, himself of tribal ancestry, blew a prime opportunity to go beyond the tourists' view in this 1998 work. Depressingly, what Rites boils down to is 40,000-year culture as theme park. For while there are strikingly elemental moments – a heap of slumbering flesh slowly rising up like a nest of snakes, smoking burnt offerings, splashing water, bodies slathered in wet clay – mostly what we see are classically trained dancers posturing. As they stick out their bottoms, pretend to be dingoes or roll on the floor, the girls in fetching little mud-hued minis, the men glossy-skinned and six-packed, the whole thing smacks of an Outback fashion shoot.

There are glimpses of genuine poetry in isolated moments, most memorably in a solo for Bangarra's gaunt, wired and wary Patrick Thaiday, dodging other bodies like Tolkien's Gollum hopping between rocks, yet at the same time earthed and weighted: a paradox embodied.

Not even Stravinsky came out of this smiling. Though Oz Ballet's musical director Nicolette Fraillon kept the time-changes tightly reined, the score's rutting thrusts and shrieks were far too decorous. History relates that Stravinsky disapproved of the original staging of this music, preferring the second choreographic attempt on it by Massine. It is Massine's 1933 ballet Les Présages (Premonitions) that provides the bill's other half: a stylistically unstable work that seems unable to decide which century it's in.

Broadly following a scenario about a man torn between love and military action (an issue which for some reason involves a baddie in lurid green makeup who sneers and beats his chest) each section is set to a movement of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No 5 – itself a thicket of good-vs-evil references with its echoes of melodic themes from The Sleeping Beauty.

At least at the militaristic opening you know where you are: The 1930s fascist threat beams from every hard- drilled gesture, with every permutation of criss-crossed and rigid arms, except, noticeably, anything that could ever be construed as a Nazi salute.

Australian Ballet performs 'Swan Lake' at The Lowry, Salford (0870 787 5780) 14-18 Oct