The Rodin Project, Russell Maliphant Company, Sadler's Wells

Like a bleached Mount Parnassus for the gods, pouring linen down steep slopes in foaming white rivers, streaming white curtains up into heaven, few stage sets I’ve seen for a dance piece have been as captivatingly gorgeous as Es Devlin and Bronia Housman’s mountainous creation for Russell Maliphant’s new work. The dancers too are draped in white like gods - or statues to be unwrapped from dust-sheets. The visual metaphors cunningly overlap, for this is a work in which Maliphant intends homage to the art of sculptors, notably the French neo-classical rebel, Auguste Rodin.

It comes across as bedtime, though, and not necessarily in a good way. The two-part piece, premiered in Paris last week and having a single UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells yesterday evening, is limper and more overblown than his previous beauty AfterLight. Why shouldn’t a choreographer be able to fail more often than not? The problem is that nowadays the stakes are so much costlier, and while there are ghosts of risks there in the sheeting, they remain only ghosts.

Very dependent on its fine set - left bare, black and jaggedly volcanic in the second half - the work also cedes much dramatic authority to its breathtaking lighting by Michael Hulls. Every credit to the funders in Sadler's Wells, Paris, Luxemburg and New York for opening their cheque books for these fantastical scene effects, but it gives Maliphant too much to do to steer it all to glory. Somewhere inside those sheets, on top of those rhomboid rocks, he appears to be testing new ideas and possible directions that are not yet fully conceived, and the entire thing looks more like a fashion set at the moment than the space for a choreographer with his inner eye in gimlet focus on the tailoring.

AfterLight showed Maliphant's melodious physical signature at its very best, extracting all the mass and gravity from the whirls of a poignantly anonymous man, so that only the essence of movement and light remained. He’s also used his velvety touch in some powerful duets before, notably with the Ballet Boyz and with Sylvie Guillem (Torsion, Critical Mass, Broken Fall, Two, Push) - such strong dancers, with so much of their past and history to bring, that these pieces have had their own steel core inside.

Here, though, Maliphant is - give him credit - trying out two hardening agents on his whipped-cream language: the idea of monumental sculpture, and some of the vocabulary of streetdance, a sharp urban variant of the stylised martial arts of his own training, capoeira, tai-chi. But the way he pacifies, melts and bends both of these ingredients turns out fairly soporific, half-decided, indeterminate - yet I fancy that buried inside all that elegant tedium there is a nugget of something new struggling to be born. (Pictured above right, Rodin's La Danaïde)

In that sense, there’s a parallel with the act of the sculptor in conjuring a form or figure out of a piece of stone. But this only works if by using Rodin, specifically, Maliphant intuits something fresh and strong about his own work, rather than simply paying a fan's homage.