As Iggy Pop's Mass Production roared around the Dome and seven dancers arched their backs in seedy Leigh Bowery unitards, Michael Clark himself made an appearance on Wednesday night.

In a blonde shock of a wig he looked like a mad scientist, minding his strange, androgynous creations. Taking it easy at 43, he stepped out slowly, swirling a transparent walking stick which he then used to trip himself into a comically anticlimactic exit.

It was a brief cameo for the former "bad boy" of dance. And, in a show which seemed to fire a lot of imaginative blanks, it was the only point at which I felt a sense of this famous choreographer's character.

This revised, completed revival of 1994's O is the first part of Clark's Stravinsky Project, a much-publicised partnership between the choreographer and the Barbican.

But the appetiser OO was slick in everything except the dancers' execution, while the mythically-inspired main piece captivated me only for the duration of the sensual duet between Apollo and his muse.

In their brief white slips, their limbs revolving in synchronicity rather than entwining, they reminded me of lovers on a Sunday morning, nestling dreamily into the spaces created by each other's bodies.

In the past Clark's dancers have been forced to compete with a stage full of preposterous props.

Here props seemed hardly to inspire at all.

In OO the dancers hooked their walking sticks round their limbs, swung them like dandies and tried to get them behind their backs without taking their hands off the ends.

In short, they did all the things you or I would do if told to be a bit creative with a walking stick, transparent or otherwise.

For O's dramatically-promising opening the male lead was shut in a large mirrored box.

But, once animated, he merely used it to assist in a few handstands. Had it been a tank in the Sealife Centre I wouldn't have been able to resist tapping the glass in the hope of provoking a little more activity.

I was prepared to be challenged, piqued even, by Clark's classically-indebted and punk-fuelled vision. It turns out being underwhelmed can prove just as provoking.