Ballet has always suffered from a shortage of stories that can communicate without the medium of the spoken word or a lengthy synopsis in the programme. Recourse has often been made to familiar fairy tale and legend, but recently popular films and novels have also become a favoured source – Matthew Bourne, for instance, has fed off both The Red Shoes and Edward Scissorhands, while Christopher Wheeldon turned to Like Water for Chocolate and Cathy Marston to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The question that seldom seems to be asked in such cases is a basic one: can dance bring anything to the table, and can its language enlarge the source or create a new dimension? If the answer is pretty much no, then why bother?

That, alas, is my gut response to Natalia Horecna’s raid on Fellini’s early masterpiece La Strada. What was the point? The sentimental tale of the blessedly simple-minded Gelsomina and her tragically abusive relationship with the fairground strong-man Zampano seems so much richer and deeper on the screen than it does in her cartoon version, which makes a number of cardinal errors. Two ministering angels dressed like fancy waiters are redundant; the protracted epilogue is bathetic and incoherent; despite the best efforts of the dancer Mick Zeni, Zampano’s complex of brutality, tenderness and remorse is only pallidly suggested; and a clumsily concocted hotchpotch extracted from the oeuvre of Nino Rota (composer of the music for Fellini’s film) provides no context to what we see on stage.

What keeps the enterprise afloat is the wondrous Alina Cojocaru as Gelsomina. Cynics might say that playing the innocent waif is her stock-in-trade and there are certainly moments here when her doe-eyed manner is nothing more than cutely whimsical. But Horecna’s fluent choreography gives her scope for dancing that is never less than meltingly voluptuous, as free as the air and yet thrillingly precise when it pauses or poses. Who else today can match the expressivity of her arms or her gloriously pliant back? She embodies ballet’s purest poetry.

On a less exalted plane, the performances throughout the supporting cast are admirable, and it was a special pleasure to see Cojocaru’s husband Johan Kobborg, still crisp, slender and buoyant at the venerable age of 51, as Zampano’s unicycling rival Il Matto. But the show is overall a disappointment.

One of the many admirable activities of the Place, the pioneering dance centre near King’s Cross, is its annual festival offering 22 nursery slots to young practitioners with a desire to experiment and explore. The audience never knows quite what it’s going to get and in a field weighed down by repetition of the same-old, that swift turnover is very refreshing: you may well be baffled, entranced or repelled, but you will not be bored. And if it bombs, no great harm done.

Each evening presents three sets of hopefuls. First up when I went was a trio of girls impersonating coyly giggling geishas who morph into valley-girl bitches before becoming violently predatory – a variation of the trope of lady into fox. Then came two disaffected young men in hoodies and trackies, addressing the fashionable theme of toxic masculinity and its soft underbelly.

Last and best was a solo by Vasiliki Papapostolou. Inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, his model for a prison in which every cell was visible from a central surveillance point, she presents herself as a human machine whose every finger twitch, every smile or frown is dictated by the tick of a slowly accelerating metronome. Efforts to resist, including a brief outburst of ecstatic freedom, are swiftly quashed. Papapostolou moves though it all like a zombie dervish: the effect is both grotesque and discomfiting.