Phoenix Dance Theatre, Sadler's Wells, London

Lost for clues

An announcement on behalf of the National Missing Persons Helpline is an unusual feature for the programme notes of a dance production, but Darshan Singh Bhuller's new Requiem for Phoenix Dance Theatre is an unusual work. Not so much for its mixture of stage action and film: that is almost a cliché nowadays. But concentration on a dramatic situation has become less common, and the nature of the subject is distinctly uncommon, being based on news stories about families who have lost a child.

Some will find this brave, serious and admirable; others (and I veer towards their side) may be tempted to think that he is cashing in on the emotional appeal of a situation that his dances cannot live up to. There is an awful lot of crawling around, apparently in search of clues, while the screen at the back says "Day Two", "Day Three", etc. There is a lot of repetition in all aspects, which becomes boring rather than pattern-making.

Members of the families get involved in various incidental and irrelevant activities; these are true to life, which is more than can be said of an erotic duet ending with the cheap laugh of a picture of the couple smoking in bed over the caption "52 seconds later". Requiem is quite long, feels even longer, and doesn't really get anywhere, either as dance or as drama. Jocelyn Pook has written music for it; she contributed to the fascinating Strange Fish for DV8, but is best known for Stanley Kubrick's film Eyes Wide Shut – and this new piece feels rather like a film score.

We may remember Darshan Singh Bhuller as being for years one of London Contemporary Dance Theatre's finest dancers, but there is not much fine dancing in Requiem. Nevertheless, as Phoenix Dance's new artistic director (returning to Leeds where he and the company both began under Nadine Senior's enlightened regime at Harehills School), he has commissioned two all-dance works to complete this programme.

Fin Walker's Me & You is a brief, brisk, aggressive duet for two men, energetically performed by David Hughes and Martin W Hylton. Jeremy Nelson's The Fact That It Goes Up is more relaxed: maybe too much so at times, I thought, as the three men and three women stand around and repeatedly raise an arm above their heads. Luis Lara Malvacias's backdrop, showing bits of enigmatic machines, and Douglas Henderson's eclectic soundtrack do more than the choreography to explain Nelson's otherwise puzzling description of the piece as an urban landscape.

Touring to 9 May (www.phoenixdancetheatre.co.uk)