Ros Warby, Purcell Room, London, *

Australia has produced more than its due share of good dancers, so the prospect of an Australian dance week on the South Bank had some appeal. Too bad that the first presentation did not live up to expectations.

Ros Warby's show over the bank-holiday weekend consisted of three solos by three choreographers. The best was a short number (eight minutes) by Lucy Guerin, another Australian whose work we have seen previously from Mikhail Baryshnikov's company. Called Living with surfaces, it set the dancer in a red tunic against a green back wall. There wasn't (and this is true of the whole evening) any very energetic movement; Warby seems to prefer slow pacing, still poses, moderate leg extensions, hand gestures and face-pulling.

However, Guerin makes her vary this a little by grabbing her arms, body, legs or bottom and tugging them into a different position. No, that's not much upon which to build a dance, but it's a cut above the rest of the show.

Such variety as there is in Warby's own solo, Eve, is provided by the lighting designer Margie Medlin. She offers shadows, silhouettes and film sequences that enable Warby either to undertake a duet with her often enlarged or incomplete self, or simply to disappear backstage for a rest. This is meant, Warby explains, to be about different aspects of female identity. You would hardly know. At one point, she envisages on film the face of a chap who, like her, mouths enigmatic phrases; I can see that I really must study lip-reading.

No need for that, however, in the final solo, Fire, Warby's adaptation of choreography by Deborah Hay, because here she speaks out loud. "Who are you?" she asks more than once, looking at the audience. "Where are you from?" And, "What do you want?". I could most easily have answered that last: what I wanted was for her to stop playing the silly ass, to give up her tuneless singing and other daft noises, often sounding rather rude (which I think is how some of her gestures were meant to look).

Instead, she might have tried actually to provide a little dancing, which after all is what we were all supposed to be there for. But judging by the flatness and extremely limited range of all her efforts, maybe that is something beyond Ms Warby – dancing, I mean. Not the best of nights for the Antipodes, nor for the South Bank.