VINCENT Dance Theatre’s Let the Mountains Lead You to Love is the tenth live production Charlotte Vincent has made since founding her Sheffield-based company in 1994. The 70-minute piece was devised under her guidance by six performers hailing from Austria, Poland and Britain.

The result is an undernourished scramble of Chekhov, Pina Bausch and a party. Vincent seeks the kind of unbridled atmosphere in which participants might think, “I can’t believe I’ve drunk so much”. Richard Lowdon’s stage design features skinny tree trunks and dried leaves. In this faux woodsy setting the cast tries to capture behaviours and feelings — flirtation, embarrassment, conformity, giddy then gruelling excess — common to prolonged and intimate public gatherings.

The ingratiating Janusz Orlik emerges first, posing proudly until he spots the shirt-tail sticking out of his open fly. The others, four women and a second male, dribble on, accompanied by lounge music. The women’s retro clothing carries a whiff of nostalgia.

The group’s moods swing from near-hysterical revelry to rock-bottom sobriety, while their dancing blends deliberate, almost gymnastic klutziness with pinches of trusting, tender lyricism. There are three simultaneous slap-and-slug duets to classical piano, some dizzy folk dance, a striptease by Eliot Kay and even a bit of yodelling.

The show’s tonal switches are paralleled by the performers’ vacillations between feigned and genuine emotion. Talented and willing as they are, their work is either too much or not enough.

TC Howard, a pint-sized dynamo, totters about balletically in men’s shoes while manipulating a butterfly-like folded paper. She later stops clowning and reads its “I’ve-fallen-out-of-love-with-you” contents aloud. Delivering Garbo’s line “I want to be alone” like a miserable child, dancing violinist Patrycja Kujawska eventually rejoins society by forcing the others to mimic her amusingly clumsy moves.

Vincent indulges her penchant for phony drama via Aurora Lubos. To rollicking polka music Lubos, feigning pregnancy, is treated hideously. Unfortunately her violation is taken to such an extreme that the premise waxes even more false than it was to begin with.

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