Siobhan Davies Dance Company, Upper Heyford Airbase, Oxfordshire<br></br>Danses Concertantes, Sadler's Wells, London

On the runway - but flying nowhere

The first ordeal was negotiating the razor-wired checkpoints. The next was the two-mile drive across land so bleak and featureless it might have been the dark side of the moon. When finally you pitched up at the appointed place for the Siobhan Davies premiere, Hangar 3022, at the end of an overgrown runway, the conditioning process was complete. You were ready for anything: a UFO landing, a Cold War military pow-wow, a séance to summon the spirits of dead bomber pilots – anything, in fact, but a standard theatre experience of earnest modern dance. This was as Davies intended.

Plants and Ghosts is the choreographer's first creation in nearly two years, and initially it looked as if she was planning to break new ground. Showing the work in an aircraft hangar, an art gallery, a wool mill and a tea warehouse (among other unusual venues on the coming tour) relieves it of some of the encumbering expectations dance brings with it when viewed on a proscenium stage. Precedents no longer impinge, imaginations can float free, coloured by whatever connotations each space supplies.

At first, that's what seemed to be happening inside the corrugated metal cavern at Upper Heyford. A strip of (imported) dance floor, with spectators seated down two sides, immediately became a runway. The opening rumblings of Max Eastley's "sound installation" were distant engine noise. Even the harsh, macho history witnessed by those rusty walls seemed to find – imagination working overtime – a kind of appeasement in the dancers' supple flesh. But that was in the first few minutes of the piece, and that was as far as it went.

In the past I have admired Davies's work for its humanity, for the way it made an almost purely abstract language say something real and true about the experience of being in one's skin. But the movement in Plants and Ghosts doesn't seem human at all. From the opening image of a lone figure quavering and guttering like a dead leaf in the road, through flickering ensembles which leave the impression of disintegrating old film run backwards, the theme is that of absence and not-being.

One recurring image has Henry Montes on hands and knees studying different ways of anchoring his palms to the floor, just as if his body were new to him and he hadn't yet fathomed how it worked. Other dancers variously walk on stilts, manipulate long poles like spectral medieval jousters, or toy inscrutably with flexible spikes plucked from quivers strapped to their bodies. There is a vague air of antiquity. I imagined the goddess Diana inspecting her arsenal, checking that all the tips were sharp.

Not all these episodes are engrossing to watch, and hardly any achieve the rapt beauty of Davies's earlier work. This is fidgety, twitchy stuff, highly wrought in its detail, but so cryptic as to baffle a wartime code-breaker. It's all rather hard work. Relief comes in the one playful episode, with a spoken text written by Caryl Churchill. A disembodied voice relays an item of gossip about a woman in a restaurant, then repeats it over and over, adding new information at each telling, while the dancer Deborah Saxon frantically relays the lengthening saga in sign language. This is not only great fun, but offers a neat metaphor for the choreographer's own obsession with detail. It sits oddly, though, with the remote abstractedness of the rest of the piece. Plants and Ghosts isn't a new chapter in Davies career so much as a finicky re-write on a clean page.

New York City Ballet also knows how hard it is to be creative and live with a brilliant past. Having been blessed by association with not one but both of America's two great 20th-century ballet choreographers – George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, now both dead – it has struggled to find fresh material that fits the company look but isn't a pale imitation. Danses Concertantes features eight NYCB principals and soloists and offers a good balance of old and new, but underlines yet again how present the ghost of Mr B is still.

The world premiere, a duet by Benjamin Millepied, proved to be a beautifully pointed but quite conventional essay in classical style. I liked the idea of including the solo flautist on stage. Remarkable how the very human phrasing of the Bach partita, imposed by the flautist's obvious need to take breaths, loosened up the phrasing of the dance in a way that looked organic and right. Perhaps ballet classes should give up their metronome-correct pianists, and bring in wind players instead.

Briton Christopher Wheeldon's contribution – a more substantial piece for all eight dancers – paid an even more marked homage to the past. Polyphonia, set to 10 unconnected piano pieces by Ligeti, made deliberate reference to movement themes of Balanchine: spiky, quirky, but always confidently meshed into the classical line. One of the best sections was near-identical to the duet in Tryst, Wheeldon's last-season commission for the Royal Ballet. But who's complaining when new ballet is as good as this? Earlier we'd had Jerome Robbins's In The Night (1970), whose romantic swoonings and ballgown glamour look rather dated now. Hard to believe this was from the same imagination that produced West Side Story. But just as you were writing it off as safe and soppy, some extraordinary feat of visual daring would make you blink: a girl's slow cartwheel in her man's arms, or the whirling asymmetrical lift that turned Wendy Whelan's skirts into the rings of Saturn.

But it was ultimately Balanchine and Stravinsky's show. Duo Concertant, in a 30th anniversary performance, struck the classic Balanchine/Stravinsky balance of intellectual rigour and plangent lyricism. It still leaves you with your heart in your mouth. I take my hat off to any young choreographer whose work can survive in its shadow.

j.gilbert@independent.co.uk

Siobhan Davies: Victoria Miro Gallery, London N1, 10-18 October, and touring until 16 November (020 7228 6020)