The titles of Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak’s dance works tend to be short, snappy and more than a tad ambiguous. Since 1999 the Israeli duo’s productions Wrapped, Oyster, Boobies and Shaker have all been presented by the Dance Umbrella festival. Now comes Hydra, an hour-long performance seen at the South Bank earlier this week. Although beautifully staged and danced, the piece was perhaps too muted in its intentions to make a completely satisfying impression.

Pinto and Pollak are jointly responsible for almost every aspect of their shows. The setting here was a box-like space with a discreet exit on either side, a long, thin window in the back wall and a giant sandbag hanging high overhead stage left. In this spare environment 12 dancers, six of each sex, indulged in motions that ranged from the acrobatic to the lyrical. The men, one of whom was significantly older than the others, wore dark suits. The women were clad in pale, high-waisted shifts. The score was a mix of sound effects (the wind, droning engines, bird calls, the neighing or clip-clop of horses) and classical and contemporary music by the likes of Bach, Purcell, Gavin Bryars and Arvo Pärt.

All of the individual elements of Hydra were elegant and well chosen. The trademark ingenious quirkiness of the company’s choreography — at once sharp and abrupt, and yet somehow flowing — was also much in evidence, especially in ensemble passages involving simple props such as the long black pole used to scoop up the women languishing on the floor and fly them about. A hole was eventually poked into the sandbag. The slow spilling of its contents put me in mind of time and mortality, but it could easily possess any number of other meanings. This exemplifies the basic problem of a soft, sombre and surreal show that was dreamily, even impeccably evocative, but of what I would be hard pressed to say.

There were no such uncertainties about J’Accuse, the brief but blazingly strong solo that preceded Hydra. Part of Umbrella’s African Crossroads season, it was created by a growling powerhouse known as Kaolack (real name: Pape Ibrahima Ndiaye), whose blend of political protest and knowing animal magnetism was both provocative and heartening.

Dance Umbrella ends Nov 7

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