Stephen Petronio Company, Barbican Theatre

Nico Muhly at the piano, Stephen Petronio in a false beard, a storm-at-sea theme derived from The Tempest - how hip is that? I Drink the Air Before Me, a new work for the Stephen Petronio Company as the opening night of this year’s Dance Umbrella (the annual international modern dance fest that packs London’s venues for the month), had promise. The young composer delivered, the theme had its moments, but the picture above is a fiction - it’s a wish-list, as so many publicity stills for dance are, fine tailfeathers for dull birds. A couple of hours later I grope for my notebook to remember the choreography I saw last night.

Precious little sticks in my mind: posing dancers in bare feet doing a dainty, constipated form of extract-of-ballet (teetering on tiptoe in fifth position, arms straight out to the sides, bodies tilting stiffly into the diagonal). It certainly doesn't attain the rumbustious, heedless imagery of the photographs. It has an overall similarity, in a bloodless and patchy way, to Michael Clark’s recent bloodless and patchy works.

But then Petronio has lived a 25-year career in the tall shadow of the venerated Clark, his former lover, and the only truly lively moment of dance in this piece was a male duet late on where suddenly two men seemed in the moment, both battling and caressing each other. There, for a couple of minutes, I felt the physical passion and inquiry of movement, and I felt engaged, I stopped just listening to Muhly’s music (a diverting mix of hunting calls on a trombone and scrubbing double bass) and focused properly on this dancing. Then it was lost again.

The work took its time to start, with dancers warming up (a usual sight) interrupted by a not usual sight at all: a weird character disguised in a fake beard and nautical clothing stalking the stage, talking to the audience, tying very long ropes around the auditorium, and humming sea shanties. This is Petronio, playing the quirky cameo in his piece just as Michael Clark likes to appear with a toilet around his head in his own recent work. A choir of schoolgirls with appealingly callow voices vocalised “aah” in two-part harmony to us, as the salty dog climbed up a gantry into a crow’s nest.

There are plenty of costumes - big coats, light-blue overalls, oatmeal knitted short-johns, Everton Mint-striped T-shirts and pants - which generally enhance the brawn of the women among the 11 dancers, while enhancing the beauty of the men. Possibly in keeping with the eye of a hurricane, it all has a vacuous quality: the gaping black stage threatening to suck up any thin or undernourished choreography, which this is. Bits of skips, hornpipe, plié and developpé - there’s a whiff of ballet school about the steps, and the earthbound dancers don’t serve my idea of Ariel, Shakespeare’s sprite of the air, who dances through storms and sucks with bees.

Three cheers, then, for Nico Muhly, just because he had worked up something much more engaging to listen to than the stage offered to watch. With an funny little bottom-heavy band of trombone, viola, flute, double bass and bassoon up on a platform and himself attacking an amplified piano the other side of the stage, a conversation struck up that usually had something rhythmic or textural going for it, barbed here, punchy there, so that I felt my inner pendulum relishing the missed beats.

And there is character for the instruments - vivid solos for bravura viola, foghorn trombone and squawking bassoon in particular - while its last section is cheeringly reminiscent of the last pages of Stravinsky’s Les Noces, little handbells that strike against clanging piano. This makes it all nicely dansante, but wasted on a choreographer using such a limited palette.

There are more stimulating US choreographers whose work can be seen in the 2010 Dance Umbrella - the veteran Trisha Brown (with whom Petronio started) on the South Bank and Tate Modern (15-19 Oct) and the late Merce Cunningham, whose final creation will be shown as the climax of the festival (26-30 Oct, Barbican). And in Petronio’s own generation there are more inventive and amusing individuals: Jonathan Burrows (13-15 Oct, Sadler’s Wells Theatre) for one.

• Dance Umbrella, from 5-30 October, is at the Barbican, Sadler's Wells, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Tate Modern and other London sites
• Joe Muggs reviews Nico Mulhy with the Britten Sinfonia on theartsdesk
• Nico Muhly's website has a sample from the new work