It’s nearly a quarter of a century since Michael Nunn and William Trevitt bravely left their safe haven at the Royal Ballet to set up BalletBoyz, a company aimed at developing the underused potential of male dancers and exploiting Nunn and Trevitt’s passion for film technology. At the time this seemed like a useful mission – stereotypes and prejudices lingered around men in tights, and the formats for smaller dance companies needed loosening up.

It lasts a moderate 70 minutes and, in its nutty way, it’s quite enjoyable

One measure of BalletBoyz’s subsequent success is that so many of their experiments have been incorporated into the mainstream, and the enterprise no longer seems as edgy or necessary as it did. Look at any major company today and it is likely to be stronger on the male front than the female: the impact of BalletBoyz, coinciding with the popularity of Billy Elliot and Matthew Bourne’s gender-swapped Swan Lake, has made dance a profession that even the most dinosauric of reactionary dads would be happy for his son to enter (well, almost). The crisis now, I would suggest, is that the quality of girls making it through to advanced schooling has declined: so many energetic creatures who previously would have regarded a tulle tutu and satin shoes as an exciting prospect have been lured into the more lucrative rough and tumble of competitive sports, leaving ballet with a glut of dainty little mademoiselles without much personality or sexuality. How about BalletGirlz? How about ballet women, come to that?

Significantly, half of the cast of BalletBoyz’s latest enterprise is female – the company no longer sees the need to be exclusive – and it largely competes on equal terms with its male counterpart, although a diminutive blonde called Artemis Stamouli is given some prominence and treated in a thoroughly sexist manner by the blokes. But what the hell is going on here? If you can’t tell England on Fire’s head from its tail, that’s probably because it has neither. It offers only ‘a journey with no destination’ that is, in the words of the programme essay, ‘full of imagination, risk, rebellion, community and uncertainty, wrapped up in a bundle of controlled chaos’. Some might call it a mess.

Inspired by Stephen Ellcock and Matt Osman’s eponymous volume of images of ye olde and weirdy Albion, it ambitiously employs 14 dancers, eight choreographers, six composers, an ‘art rock’ band and instrumental ensemble to present a farrago of Blakean mysticism and Wicker Man-ish folklore, flashes of newsreel footage and steampunk twaddle, all flying under the flag of St George and amounting to a pageant of our national identity as seen from outsider perspectives.

It lasts a moderate 70 minutes and, in its nutty way, it’s quite enjoyable. But it promises more than it delivers and seems rather profligate. There’s some vatic spoken commentary (‘England is a hothouse flower and all the glass is cracked’) intoned by an invisible voice and blazoned on the backscreens, and an abundance of fancy lighting and costuming, but meanwhile the dancers haven’t been given anything special to do. Only a characteristically slinky duet by Russell Maliphant and a comic trio for three woebegone furry beasts stand out.

The filler is a lot of earnest writhing and magic circling, underpinned by a sense of social collapse and imminent apocalypse that doesn’t seem truly earned. BalletBoyz have never lacked ambition or ideas but they’ve bitten off more than they can chew here, and I felt that the audience’s reception was perfunctory. Time for them to get back to rigorously choreographed basics.