Yes, well – where does one start? Perhaps with the paucity of punters. There were fewer than 100 in Symphony Hall, even though life offers relatively few chances to enjoy a multimedia piece in praise of smoking, conjured by the distinguished European avant-garde from four writhing dancers, one glaring actress, a mute film triptych, musicians enduring instrumental paroxysms and the acrid smoke of at least 20 cigarettes.

Along with an oxygen cylinder, audiences needed the gift of patience to survive I Am a Mistake. It’s the self-indulgent, wearying creation of the Belgian provocateur/writer/ choreographer Jan Fabre, the worryingly prolific German composer Wolfgang Rihm and the Paris-based film-maker Chantal Akerman, who moves her camera only if she sneezes.

The nub of the 70-minute piece is a 20-year-old Fabre text equating smoking with nonconformity, declaimed with some punch by the glaring (and coughing) Hilde Van Mieghem after 50 minutes of dance convulsions in praise of nicotine’s “glamour”. Some were beautiful. Many were sexy. But 50 minutes of them? Tied to a spotty Rihm score that staggered between inspiration and desperation with notes fused in a hyperactive rampage or dripping like a tap? It would be too much even if the show were in praise of tofu.

Akerman’s melancholy images, featuring the dancers puffing at more cigarettes, quickly became wallpaper. No competition there for conductor Lucas Vis and Ensemble Reserche barrelling confidently through Rihm’s labyrinth. Or the dancers’ gymnastics, interrupted from time to time by the display of a leg decorated with the word “Marlboro” or the burning of holes in poster images of Putin, George W., bin Laden and faces too Belgian to be recognised.

But the mistake of I Am a Mistake reaches beyond its thinness and length. The nub itself, though pungently phrased and delivered, was inappropriate, curiously old-fashioned. Fabre has good enough reasons for railing at our proscriptive society and the impeding of freedom. Yet the days when smoking could be paraded as an artist’s V-sign vanished some 50 years ago. Surely, the best way to celebrate artistic rebellion is to create provocative and resonant art – not this flatulent squib.

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