Firsts, Linbury Studio, London

New faces! shouts the publicity for the fifth ROH2 "Firsts" season, emblazoned over a photograph of a tattooed and lip-pierced girl biting on a length of chain. I had always thought the point of the Linbury Studio was to provide a try-out pad for budding ballet and opera creatives, but in the opening programme of "Firsts" they are nowhere to be seen. The other potential for Covent Garden's "alternative space" is to draw in audiences who wouldn't normally set foot in an opera house, hence the £5-a-seat pricing (thanks to the Helen Hamlyn Trust). But is hip-hop and a hoopla act going to inspire a return for some Frederick Ashton? I detect woolly thinking, or a slightly desperate bid to fill an otherwise empty space.

What's more, very few of these "Firsts" have anything new about them. New to the Linbury, maybe; but after multiple airings around the country, that's stretching it a bit. Jonzi D's TAG ... Just Writing My Mame has even done a stint at Sadler's Wells! Here, we got only an extract, and it really wasn't enough. TAG tells the story of a graffiti artist's hunt for good walls to spray on, rather like a dog with its scent. Four "b-boys", each dressed in a different paint colour of hoodies and droopy shorts, are aerosolled into life by the can-wielding artist. "This girl, she's got attitude," raps the narrator, as the artist ssshwurps the girl's hand to her hip and a scowl to her features. The humour works as a softener, making black street culture less threatening. You can see how this would appeal to the ROH2 organisers: it makes multi-culturalism almost cuddly.

I was lost in the second item, chiefly because of a stationery mishap. Had the programme note for The Saturated Moment been printed on anything but deep blue paper, I might have been able to read it. As it was, I was unaware of its being "a response in movement, sound and light to Virginia Woolf's The Waves" and decided it was about an undine, her transformation from drowning human to spiteful water sprite, and the pranks she played on passing naval vessels. It tallied perfectly with dancer Dominique Bulgin's gasps and swoops and frantic hand jive, as well as the crashing sea noise. When I read later, in a good light, how "Woolf's six characters dissolve into each other as events are refracted and replayed", I felt I'd probably got off lightly.

Less brainwork was demanded by Finnish aerialist Ilona Jantti. Curling her spine round the inner rim of a suspended hoop, she simply lies there, dormouse-like. Sometimes she drapes herself horizontally, as if on a comfy mattress, or trails out a leg, or loops bits of herself into smaller hoops. But apart from her freaky 110 per cent hip rotation and pixie-like demeanour, I found little to hold my attention.

Last came Tongue-Tied, a purely musical ROH2 commission from a group called Askew and Avis, in fact a band of three, who create impressively layered jazz from just two voices and live-looping technology. The plot was sweetly appealing: a couple whose teenage son never spoke, but stayed in his room, headphones on, twiddling knobs. The joke is that the vocal material he is processing is the result of his parents' anxieties about him (some of them very funny) and also of their marital discord. Clever, and nicely circular, but hardly "opera".