The defining moment of Angelin Preljocaj's latest work is also in danger of sending its audience to sleep. While a guitar plays honeyed melodies in the background, Preljocaj's dancers drift into a collective embrace. Their airy, languorous limbs fold into sweet accommodations of shape and line, and the effect is both luminous and deliciously somnolent.
Near Life Experience is about those out-of-body moments when the senses become so charged that the mind cuts loose. A lot of the moments portrayed are delectable, such as orgasm and exhilaration. Others are agonising, like the section in which dancers jerk under some invisible assault and their brains become blind mechanisms of protest.
Other variants of the theme are unsettling. Being out of body can involve a scary dislocation of self - like those moments near death when the mind spirals so far into the ether it doesn't know how to re-connect with the world.
This concept fascinates Preljocaj and during various passages he attaches the dancers to crimson threads or giant umbilical cords so that they can be tugged back to reality when the choreography has them straying too far.
Preljocaj's works always sound wonderful on paper, and most of the themes in Near Life do get embodied fabulous dance images. But they add up to less than they should.
The choreography looks as if it was made in a rush, with none of the ideas pushed to their full potential. When dancers perform with wine glasses attached to their arms they become surrounded with an extraordinary, brittle aura of light and air.
But when so little of their choreography aims beyond bland unison and repetition, a "so what" factor emerges. Preljocaj is good at making us dream in happy sympathy with his dancers - he's less good at jerking us back to attention.
· At Sadler's Wells, London, until Saturday. Box office: 0870 7377737.
