The Featherstonehaughs, The Place

It’s a reasonable argument, I'd say, that it is only worth going out to see dance, or anything else, if it’s probably going to be better than telly or conversation with friends. And only if it’s also worth spending a couple of hours travel by train, say £30 to £40, tickets all told, plus a drink on the town. Something for the Arts Council to take on board when considering who to lash out £364,044 taxpayers’ annual subsidy on, no? Or too base a criterion?

So much is now at stake for the future vigour of modern dance on British stages that we should not pussyfoot about any more. It might be enough kudos in funding circles for Lea Anderson to be told by le cool magazine (last week): "You're known for being cutting-edge and pushing the boundaries" (like, whatever), but the audience needs a less desultory kind of persuasion. Anderson had some clever moments of image-making in the 1990s, but there were other brighter and (candidly) less well-funded talents to get more excited about. Last night at The Place, revisiting one of the pieces I did really enjoy long, long ago was a deep disappointment on many different levels.

In 1998 Anderson, who has built a stable career on the clever twin sales points of an all-female group, the Cholmondeleys, and an all-male group, the Featherstonehaughs, seemed pretty impressive: she was touring a resonant Chums piece, Flesh and Blood, that I still remember for its grand-guignol cutting relish of women’s various repressive/inspiring images, and a then striking masculine counterpoint in The Featherstonehaughs Draw on the Sketchbooks of Egon Schiele, with six men dressed in paint-splattered suits and horrifically bruised faces stomping like drugged zombies, creatures assembled by a deluded mind, refracting their creator, the eponymous Austrian painter. I thought it was rather brilliant.

Twelve years later Anderson has revisited and rechoreographed the Schiele piece; we are all older, saturated with new images, and post Rhydian, Jedward and the Twilight Saga those shock hairdos and robotic moves now take on more banal associations. Experiences of more precise, ambitious dance language and emotionally intelligent theatre (of Pina Bausch above all) have altered one's eyesight for retrospectives of 1990s British dance-theatre. Last night when I got back home I revisited my old review, wondering how what seemed so empty and poseurish during the evening had struck me so brightly 12 years ago.

Crucially the attitude has changed. What was pathetic then, introverted, raw, has been turned into an exhibition, more of a catwalk for Sandy Powell's outstanding costuming and make-up. They remain, but the soundtrack has altered. Some of its catchy 1998 associations have vanished, because this time I did not hear what I noted then, the Beautiful Blue Danube (as the Schiele avatars waltzed with empty arms), nor did I catch the atmosphere of a ghostly painter’s scribbling pencil. This time all I heard was the new, unrelievedly dreary guitar and drums combination of Steve Blake and Will Saunders, bashing out an admirably synchronised, syncopated score of heavy-footed discords without a single exhilarating musical idea or evocation in it. At least be scary! I wanted to say.

To this monotonous score, the ghosts of the six Schieles, sometimes clothed and standing over their own naked alter egos, sometimes writhing on mattresses like self-torturing, self-rewriting madmen, seemed less Expressionist, more cardboard, garish. The posing is now all to the audience, all a mannequin display, and it comes perilously close to a photocall, made to sell snapshots of either the suited Schiele or the stripped-bare, self-caricaturing soul (pictures right and top by Lea Anderson).

There are the picturesque Schielean details in the moves: sickle-chested, taut-shouldered lunges, splayed fingers, lugubrious glares, all highlighted by the gaudy monster-movie make-up of gashed red mouths and blackened eyes. While Anderson has constructed - deliberately - the moves as a string of postures drawn from paintings and sketches, this only yields novelty for 15 minutes. After that one has 45 minutes to think of old Boris Karloff movies and 100 Scary Moments on TV.

In the ladies’ afterwards three girls aged around 20 were talking: No, it wasn’t their thing, OK, the patterns were quite nice… animatedly adjusting their make-up for what clearly was about to be the best part of the night’s entertainment. I’ve always believed if you go out to the theatre, that should be a place for the evening’s main event, the place where the dreams, surprises, revelations and mysteries happen. I stayed on for some of the post-show talk, without which no grant gets awarded by the Arts Council. Anderson fumbled and mumbled I-dunnos, unprepared, unthinking, essentially uninterested in giving her audience any aperçus to reward their curiosity. This kind of institutionalised self-absorption chokes the life out of modern dance, both for those with memories of much better things and for those with better things to do after the show.

• The Featherstonehaughs Draw on the Sketchbooks of Egon Schiele is at The Place, London tonight and tomorrow
• The Cholmondeleys and Featherstonehaughs website

Watch a sample from the new Featherstonehaughs piece, Edits: