Survivor, Hofesh Shechter/ Antony Gormley, Barbican, review Hofesh Shechter is the existentialist film-nerd rock god of contemporary dance - a barmy-sounding statement, but entirely true. In recent pieces such as In Your Rooms and Political Mother, the Israeli-born composer-choreographer's combination of primally charged steps, pulverising scores, movie-director sensibilities and police-state angst have redefined what we come to expect from a dance work. And Survivor, his new collaboration at the Barbican with terpsichorially inclined scupltor Antony Gormley, reveals his personal demons to be alive and kicking. True to form, it starts brilliantly. Through a horizontal gap in the safety curtain shines a piercing light, illuminating a solitary figure at the front, and slicing the audience in half. However, when the curtain opens - like some vast camera-shutter in slow-motion - we're plunged into darkness, into which, to an almost monastic hum, 30 or so further motionless figures rise from the depths, each lit only by a single, swaying light. A catacomb come to life, they stand there, staring blankly at use, before climbing up to a platform above the stage strewn with drums. Soon, out of the gloom, a massive beat starts to swell, like some vast locomotive gathering steam. And, before long, we're ear-splittingly off. What follows is a grand, sprawling, chaotic piece with some truly stunning sequences, a fair old bit of padding and a drizzle of pretension. Shechter and Gormley's concerns here - perception, voyeurism, man's place in the cosmos - lead, for example, to a baffling but extraordinary passage involving a man and a metal bathtub far, far back in the hollowed-out Barbican stage, so distant that it's like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. They also spawn some eerily beautiful allegorical images - projected footage of seething flocks of birds, a dynamited tower block with inevitable echoes of 9/11, the (presumably Middle Eastern) night sky lit, with obscene beauty, by missiles and tracer fire. And then, there's the piece's most astonishing moment, one solitary performer precariously twisting in silhouette over a vast waterfall, a marvellously bleak distillation of the human condition not, as it happens, unlike Saul Bass's graphics for Hitchcock's Vertigo. Other sections, however, were disappointing. The training of a camera on the audience felt slapdash and obvious, the much-heralded 100-plus drummers on stage belonged to an entirely different piece, and the very small ensemble of dancers felt under-used. In fairness to Shechter, he always insisted that Survivor would be more a beefed-up concert than a dance show. The trouble is that while his trademark fusion of sledgehammer polyrhythms and slithery, sun-kissed, occasionally Max Richter-esque strings makes an astonishing accompaniment to movement, we've heard it several times before, and the hit-and-miss visuals on show here were insufficient compensation for the vastly pared-down clutch of dancers. Oh - and what about the giant, 32-metre pendulum that the pair promised weeks ago, which looked set to turn the entire Barbican into a giant, inexorably ticking clock? Who knows. Maybe even these two magnificently - for once, excessively - ambitious artists simply couldn't find the time.