Companhia De Danca Deborah Colker, Barbican, London

Deborah Colker presents dance as obstacle course. Over two programmes at the Barbican, the Brazilian choreographer makes her dancers negotiate walls, ladders, an onstage big wheel and a great many vases. It keeps them busy, which is just as well. Colker doesn't know how to fill a bare stage.

The dances in 4 por 4 are built around art installations. The Corners, by Cildo Meireles, is precisely that: bits of wall, with skirting boards, arranged in corners around the stage.

You need a good head for heights to dance for Colker. At one point the company's men stand on top of the walls, leaning forwards, looking down. Otherwise dancers wedge themselves into the corners, strike poses, climb the walls. Arms appear round gaps or edges to support and lift them.

There's nothing poetic or creepy about these disembodied limbs; La Belle et la Bête this isn't. Colker's dancers clutch and grope, but the tone is relentlessly perky. There are no shadows, no changes of mood.

Colker's invention wears thin by the end of Corners. But, unhappily, it is worse when she has no set on stage to help her. In Some People she is celebrating sexual freedom, so she makes her dancers strut, grab their groins and beam at the audience.

It takes forever, but it is better than her stab at pure classicism. Women in pointe shoes skip dimly about the stage, while Colker does her piano practice. She has only just returned to music lessons, and it sounds like it: she is like a dancer who looks at her feet all the time.

As the girls dance, other dancers bring on ninety vases. Dancing around the china is difficult but not exhilarating, certainly not enough to sustain a performance. Her dancers are attractive, confident gymnasts, strong and precise in balancing and partnering. But, as dancers, they're weak - dull in rhythm and footwork, blankly vivacious in style.

Colker gets her act together in the last ten minutes of Rota. The big wheel is fun, a huge hamster-style contraption that dancers turn in different directions. They let it swing to and fro, jumping off at the height of a swing.

As a waltz plays, they pull it into a spin, circling to the music. The piece ends with that image, dancers curled tight over the bars, their bodies rocking gently as the wheel turns.

The dance for the wheel has a simplicity and impact missing from the rest of the work.

It is missing from the first hour of Rota, too. There is an interminable first half, with rowing mime to Schubert's Trout quintet or running and skipping to Mozart. After the interval the wheel is there on stage, but we still have to sit through 20 minutes of languid gymnastics before it starts spinning.