Sadler’s Wells Theatre, the cutting-edge contemporary dance venue whose history is intertwined with that of modern dance, is staging its major spring season production… without any dancers. No Body strips away those in the spotlight to reveal the multitude of factors and other layers that come together to create a dance performance. Responding to the modern audience’s augmenting desire to be immersed in a production, they have fashioned a show that takes place in multiple episodes, over multiple floors, in multiple rooms across the venue in a true promenade fashion.

The concept is undeniably well thought-out. Dance can sometimes be seen as an exclusive and somewhat inaccessible medium, with its performers separated from the average audience member not only by a stage but also by a barrier of skill and discipline. That is not at all to say that dance is in any way unenjoyable to watch, but as No Body deconstructs the other multifaceted aspects of a performance (light, sound, backstage production) and immerses the audience within them, it pulls away the barrier, abolishes any passivity and invites the audience in.

LightSpace is the first piece and a powerful start to the evening. Created by Michael Hulls, it begins as the audience are led onto the curtained-off main stage and greeted by perhaps two hundred dangling tungsten light bulbs that melt through different states of luminosity and temperature. Hulls’s design is a homage to manufactured light at its most antique, made haunting, soothing and even ethereal by the accompanying work of the sound designers Andy Cowton and Mukul. The bulbs are slowly retracted upwards before a single beam of light suddenly falls upon the audience below, growing to engulf and engage every participant. The following display ranges from sensory assault to illusory harmony as the light fractures and pours into a miasma of patterns on and around the audience, causing them to draw their own entertainment from the abstract (a grid, a searchlight, a UFO, a maze) and then feel accordingly. Hulls’s LightSpace succeeds in not only acknowledging light as a contributor to and a facilitator of theatre, but as powerful theatre itself.

No sooner has one sense been simultaneously massaged and provoked than it’s time to don a set of headphones and explore Nitin Sawhney’s aural overload, Indelible. Exploring the theatre’s multiple floors, the underscore through the headset shifting with each location, the audience member is greeted with a display that is cleverly and closely linked with the venue (and its performers’) history. Sawhney’s composition and Nick Hillel’s video projections come together in a true celebration of dance and those who study, practice and imbue it. The floor displays flow from meditative serenity to the raw, enlivened passion and vigour of a performance – but again, not a live dancer in sight. Stepping in front of a projector causes (or allows) an audience to member to cast his own shadow across the displays, his or her own silhouette becoming a part of the history this show so effectively captures. How to better to immerse an audience? In the final room (one of the venue’s dance studios), the simple echoing playback of whatever sound is produced within the four walls should descend into a dichotomy of aural insensibility but somehow doesn’t. Instead, even here Sawhney has brought together the lasting history of what this theatre is all about, overlapping past over present and present over future.

It is from this point, however, that the show seems to lose its way. The Running Tongue, an unending film directed by Siobhan Davies and David Hinton seems purposefully bizarre for no other reason. It is somewhat inventive and entertaining, yet remains entirely disposable in the grand scheme of the show. It once again places the audience on the outside looking in, losing whatever sense of immersion the previous episodes had so wonderfully established.

Designer Lucy Carter’s Hidden takes place over three parts, two of which could be skipped entirely to no great loss. Parts one and two take the form of a behind-the-scenes tour of the venue (costume department, tech desk, empty auditorium) that leaves the audience wondering whether this is expansive and insightful or just unimaginative and lazy. However, the traipsing around the building’s many breezeblock stairwells is partially redeemed by Hidden 3 where the audience are taken in groups of fifteen or so into a tucked away and claustrophobic (a positive aspect here, I promise) room far into the depths of the venue. Here an enjoyable lighting display is given as the audience once again soak in the light of fifty or more lamps and lanterns. But inevitably Carter’s piece here falls short of Hulls’s previous LightSpace.

Finally, the audience is taken into a darkened cinema with three enveloping screens that play Russell Maliphant’s film Kairos. Featuring Hellenistic dancers moving at various degrees of exhaustive slow motion, it is nevertheless beautifully lit, shot, devised and executed. This proves a reflective (if anti-climactic) end to the whole production as it finally fits the performer back into the remainder of the ensemble the audience have spent the rest of the evening exploring.

No Body is an intriguing experiment by Sadler’s Wells Theatre. At times it is sheer brilliance and exceptionally immersive but ultimately it fails to maintain the genius of its opening acts. A production not so much about dance as it is about performance, it sadly at times fails to perform. Nevertheless. it is an entertaining and engaging evening that calls on the audience to acknowledge and admire a different kind of performer.

No Body is playing at Sadler’s Wells Theatre until 12 June. For more information and tickets, see the Sadler’s Wells website.