Audiences have an insatiable appetite for the glossy package that is Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT), and a British tour by either the main company or NDT2, the youth troupe, or both (as this year), has become an annual fixture. The dancers are impressively sleek, strong and speedy, their technique a classical and contemporary blend. The house style goes in for stagings where decor and props play as prominent a role as choreography.

In a programme such as NDT1, brought to Sadler’s Wells to open the latest tour, the three pieces are not long, but the intervals are – to replace the sets. And the mood of the work, as so often with these Dutch choreographers, is dense, dark, introspective, gloomy. It’s a paradox in their performances: admire the dancing and the effects, but you may go home depressed.

Jiri Kylian is the principal style-moulder of the present-day NDT, as choreographer and long-time (but not now) director. On this bill, Wings of Wax (1997) is the best show in terms of choreography. Michael Simon’s set is a bare tree hanging inverted over the stage, like a skeletal chandelier orbited by a spotlight. The Icarus reference of the title is not, as far as I could see, pursued. The dancers emerge from a black void for flurries or movement – sometimes a continual momentum, sometimes a contrast between the slow-motion running of the women and the darting interventions of the men, with duets flaring out – all to a musical collage of Biber, Bach, Cage and Glass.

By contrast, Signing Off (2003), by the joint house choreographers, Paul Lightfoot and Sol Leon, is a big yawn – and not only in its soporific music (again Glass). The theme is parting. A man in a black suit looms, I presume, as a figure of death, claiming the dancers as they are swallowed by panels that go up and down. There are passages of strenuous dance, but nothing as striking as the billowing black curtains that fill the back of the stage and appear to cascade like a vast waterfall. Against them, the dancers process very, very slowly, like lethargic ghosts.

To close, we had Kylian again in a more recent piece, Tar and Feathers (2006). Don’t look to me for an explanation of its title, or to the choreographer, who offers no programme note. A grand piano and an intrepid pianist, Tomoko Mukaiyama, are perched on a platform on stilts, metres above the stage. I was reminded of a sketch by Les Dawson as a concert pianist, whose instrument and stool rose up from the floor at unequal rates. But Kylian has no comic purpose. Another prop, made of bubble wrap, is like a glowing iceberg.

Dirk Haubrich’s music is intermittent phrases of “treated” Mozart, interwoven with violent snarls of a wild beast and snatches of a Samuel Beckett poem, read by Kylian, hoarse and coughing. Set to this dreary melange, we have frantic grapple dance, men slithering like reptiles with a woman riding on their backs, and another woman who stares and rants silently at us. How I yearned for some uplift. NDT, and Kylian, used to do humour. This programme could have done with a dash of Dawson.

On previous visits, the Belgian multimedia company C de la B showed elaborate spectacles. Patchagonia, by the Argen-tinian company choreographer, Lisi Estaras, shown at the Purcell Room, is a chamber piece for four dancers and three musicians. Wandering souls meet in a desolate landscape (sandy floor, a blasted tree), a place at the end of everywhere.

It has lovely gypsyish music by the violinist Tcha Limberger and compellingly intimate performances, as disparate characters battle to connect while beset by insecurities. Sam Louwyck astonishes by his apparent bonelessness, sliding and rearing like a sidewinder snake, while Ross McCormack is a would-be cowboy who can’t control his (wooden) horse, but touchingly tries to charm with expert bird-whistling.

A new visitor, the 12-strong Toronto Dance Theatre, made its UK debut at the Linbury Studio theatre with Timecode Break, by Christopher House, the company’s director-choreographer. This is an attractive ensemble, though not flattered by the unisex costumes, a kind of beige toddler’s outfit, and they are shown at their best in the precision and pulse of the group passages. We view House’s piece from two perspectives – live on stage and reflected, echoed, changed and freeze-framed on split screen (in video design by Nico Stagias) – to an undemanding musical setting by Phil Strong.

The rewards of this are uneven because House’s choreography doesn’t convey much of significance. It is as if they are doing exercises or playing games, and you long for it to go somewhere. In the end, we’re left with just the screen, images speeded up, and the filmed dancers pulling funny faces. At least that wasn’t gloomy.

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