SINGAPORE — With Sadler’s Wells and The Royal Ballet credentials tuck under his belt (not to mention bragging rights to namedrop Radiohead and Harry Potter), Wayne McGregor was the second hotshot British choreographer to grace this fest edition.

His piece FAR was supposedly inspired by the Age of Enlightenment, and the title an acronym for Flesh In The Age Of Reason, a book that looks at how science and medicine in the 18th century prodded and delved into the anatomical mysteries of the body.

But I think I’ll need to see more of McGregor’s works before I can have my Eureka moment.

It begins promisingly (and dramatically) enough: To a tune from a Vivaldi opera, you have a rather conventional duet as the four corners of the space are lit up with torch lights. The flames flicker out to give way to LED lights. The future, it seems, is here.

And then FAR doesn’t go very far.

To be fair, this is a technically exceptional piece. No one can fault the 10 dancers of McGregor’s Random Dance company in terms of athleticism and skill, which was simply outstanding. There’s inventiveness, too, in the movements (a 50/50 collaboration between the performers and McGregor) — amid the balletic were the spastic and strange contortions, the seemingly unnatural and awkward actions (frantically jiggling one’s ribcage, the odd tickling gesture…).

But the hyperactive FAR’s machine gun-like way of unleashing this stream of diverse moves was just way too much for me to take in. If McGregor wants to bring science into the equation, then I’ve to say that as a whole, the choreography is something like all those squiggles, symbols and numbers you see on the blackboard of A Beautiful Mind. I used to be decent in algebra and calculus but I’m no Russell Crowe (Well, I did spot a few “plus” signs in FAR though).

There are *hints* of things, a sense of unease at points, for instance, but it really felt like he just threw all these brilliant physical phrases onstage and wait for things to coalesce in the viewer’s mind (I can’t believe I’m saying this but midway through FAR, I was yearning for some repetition).

For that much energy exploding onstage and that many wonderful bits of dancing, FAR was also just too cold.

And this is where the two other vital components come in: The much-vaunted LED lights of Lucy Carter and the much-vaunted musical score of Ben Frost.

I’m open to the idea that the frantic, the crazy nature of FAR’s dance elements would have been mesmerising had these two built up a world that befitted the experience. But unfortunately they didn’t.

Frost’s music, though full of ideas, blipping one moment, chugging heavily on a guitar the next, was a sonic plateau with no peaks. Carter’s manipulation of the LED lights board offered promises — the numbers counting down, elsewhere the stage turning an ominous orange — but mostly those 3,200 lights just… shimmer. It was so meh it made ALPHA’s own light show look like it was in the throes of IPPT.

I like very much McGregor’s notion of a “cognitive” approach to appreciating choreography (perhaps there’s a link there to Merce Cunningham), but I did wish the door was opened slightly wider. Was it too obtuse? Was it *stubbornly* obtuse? I’m willing to catch up with his ideas, but for now, FAR was a disappointing peek inside Wayne’s World.

FAR has one more show tonight, 8pm, at the Esplanade Theatre. Tickets from S$20 at SISTIC. For more details, visit http://www.dansfestival.com/2014/