The Israeli dance company Batsheva is getting quite a showcase in Britain this year. First came the group’s appearance at the Edinburgh Festival in August; then a double helping of shows at two London venues this month, presented as part of Dance Umbrella. The company started the week at Sadler’s Wells and ends it at the Riverside Studios; everywhere it performs the choreography of Ohad Naharin, its long-serving director.

You can’t say that has been much of a benefit as far as the Riverside season is concerned. Mamootot, an hour-long work for nine dancers performed with the audience seated around on four sides, is Naharin at his most intractable. Its genesis is a mystery, though you can imagine all kinds of memories welling up in its jerky, twisted language. And the frequency with which the dancers sleepwalk with robotic impassivity, or lie on the floor playing dead, suggests we are dealing with a post-death experience, an impression reinforced by their chalky white limbs.

As the vantage points shift to embrace the audience around it, Naharin busies his dancers with movements that are playful and desperate, beseeching and frantically gestural. His choreography keeps them bottled up in order to allow them to explode. Writhing bodies and contorted phrases evoke palpable emotional turmoil, but the reasons behind it are deliberately vague. The dancers are so self-absorbed that we, the audience, are barely registered. Until, that is, a feeble bout of audience participation, with dancers reaching out to shake people’s hands. There are other moments of creative desperation, like the one in which a man strips naked for a pointless solo enlivened only by his narcissistic humour.

At times it looks as if signals are passing between the performers, and your interest perks up. But for far too long it’s a case of meandering energies inexorably heading towards tedium. Where is Mamootot going? Where has it been? The costumes, like ill- fitting pyjamas, are hideous; the hotchpotch of music provides ambient temperature. As for the dancers, it’s hard to perform in the middle of an audience, up close and personal (not to mention in the nude) and bathed in harsh, bright light. They do it with remarkable aplomb — the stars are for them.

Riverside Studios, W6 (020-8237 1111), to Sat

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