Snag, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

Nice dance, but why the DJ?

A line-up of five of this country's best dancers performing each other's work, Snag not only communicate a pleasing sense of community, but also produces the slight frisson, rather like a heavy metal all-women rock band, that comes from a display of female independence. As a title, though, Snag may have originated as a brilliantly resonant idea in somebody's mind, but its meaning is obscure to the rest of us. It invites instead the kind of predictable puns that will have readers of this piece groaning. (You have been warned.)

If only the physical allure and excellence of the dancers had been matched by the choreographers Joanne Fong and Sarah Warsop. As creators of the five items that made up this mixed programme, each presented a premiere and it was with these two, ambitiously sized, lengthy company pieces, that things went most seriously adrift. Where Warsop's concerns lie more with dance as dance – spatial outline and dynamic replacing dramatic significance – Fong prefers a dance-theatre focus, with theme and gesture rather than dance step to the fore. And so the theme of "Lonely Hearts, Suspicious Minds" was female awkwardness – in those situations when you find yourself alone on a chair at a party or embarrass yourself by collapsing tired and emotional. Some of the body language is nicely observed, helped by a soundtrack of Elvis Presley songs. But the treatment is superficial and the material stretched far too thin, so that tedium quickly sets in and you feel discomfiture not for the characters, but the real-live performers. I felt sorriest for Catherine James who performed her Pina Bauschian cameo of anguished meltdown heroically, but couldn't prevent it looking like amateur pastiche.

Warsop's "Bye", presumably so named because it closed the evening, lacked any apparent overarching logic. The solos and ensembles piled on, their straight edges and angles not interesting enough, so that we seemed to be going nowhere slowly. Completing the effect was the on-stage DJ, Dave Beer, who may be a success on the club scene but whose numbingly bland sound mixes threatened to send me – and other audience members, judging by their slumped postures – into a coma. You could have said there was nothing to snag the eye or ear (clunking pun number one), except for Charles Kriel's vivid video images at the back, alien scenes of stars and swirling cosmic dust or frozen hollowed-out mountains that seemed to fit the choreography's futuristic intent.

Like Beer, Kriel was busy on stage, combining and looping his images, which meant that, strictly speaking, men were not entirely absent from the evening. But with the solo "Flap", it was a woman classical guitarist, Abigail James, who sat near Warsop the choreographer as she danced her own attractive if inconsequential movement. Worthy but inconsequential was the evening's main message. That's the snag (final clunking pun): dancers are not content with being wonderful dancers, they also want to be choreographers.