Richard Alston Dance Co, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

Anyone for a (nudge, wink) music lesson?

Richard Alston first started making dances way back in 1968, as one of the original students at the London Contemporary Dance School, and he hasn't stopped since. The trouble with longevity in such an ephemeral medium as contemporary dance is that, while it's useful to develop a recognisable style, it's hard to keep coming up with fresh takes on it. And I'm not sure Alston always does. Impressively, though, last week's South Bank run included two London premieres. I take my hat off to a man who can sustain that kind of production rate and hold down a day job on the side (a small matter of the artistic direction of The Place, if you're wondering).

The odd thing about these two most recent Alston pieces is that, while one is merely a duet and the other a big company number, it's the intimate duo that makes the impact, both in its range of feeling and command of floor space. Light Flooding Into Darkened Rooms is, for a start, exquisitely conceived, taking as a starting point not only its chosen score (a 17th-century French lute piece beautifully played on guitar by James Woodrow) but also the music's social context.

In the 1650s, propriety forbade obvious sexual advances, but a music lesson – with all its opportunities for corrective physical contact – could act as a polite cover for intimacy. Thus Alston spins a seductive conceit from the formal façade of a courtly dance, Patricia Hines and Jason Piper performing with a tremulous constraint that first hints at, then gives sway to passionate currents below the surface. When the guitarist switches to twangy mandolin for Jo Kondo's 20th-century variations on the earlier music, the passion becomes more expansive still, while remaining dignified by formal codes. Charles Balfour's lighting – bars of morning sun streaming from some imagined sash window – deliciously suggests an interior by Vermeer.

I had been looking forward to the newest piece, Touch and Go, for the music as much as anything. Alston's musical inquisitiveness is always rewarding. For him, it's not enough to use Astor Piazzolla's fabulous modern tango numbers. It has to be Piazzolla with a twist: in this case via distinctive re-orchestrations by the Italian accordionist Roberto Daris which give the tango's jabbing four-square thrust a more rounded, feminine feel. The disappointment was (I should have guessed), that the music was taped – which wouldn't have mattered so much if the performance had been more alive.

Likewise, perhaps it shouldn't matter that Alston's female dancers wear no make-up, but their scrubbed faces suddenly struck me as symptomatic of the less appealing side of Alston's craft: impeccable, but dull. What kind of woman would don satin palazzo pants and a frou-frou top by Ungaro and not bother with lipstick?

Alston's tango-inspired choreography – for all its borrowed lunges and feints – is similarly bleached-out and bland. As visiting Argentine troupes have endlessly demonstrated, tango is all about sex, sex, sex. The lethal shoes and the aggressive skirt splits are instruments of war, not appeasement. In this company, only Patricia Hines – in a central, nicely evolved duet with Martin Lawrance – struck a genuine note of sexual heat and social froideur.

j.gilbert@independent.co.uk

Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield (0114 276 9922), 5 & 6 April