For the second time this week, a dance event at the Queen Elizabeth Hall has been overshadowed by its own music.

On Tuesday the excellent African Music Workshop Ensemble easily outshone Vincent Mantsoe's tissue-thin choreography, and at the weekend the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright stole the show from American choreographer Stephen Petronio.

Lux aeterna (Latin Mass) is a soaring, beguiling piece for solo voices and chorus, the chorus part-sung, or more correctly hummed live, by two London Schools (Forest Hill and Sydenham).

It sets the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to musical flight, and sees the young singers open the show by promenading through the audience and up to their perch at the back of the auditorium.

The music and the procession evoke the ritual of Catholicism, and knowing Wainwright as we do ( confessional sex and drugs and rock and roll), his composition both subverts and distorts the sanctity of the Church. Petronio also does his best, but his signature whiplash style isn't a match for the music.

Indeed, having watched his London visits for many a year, the new Bloom looks from the same red-light dance district as before. The New York Petronio specialises in hard-driving choreography that saturates your field of vision with gyroscopic energy. His dancers move fast and sharp, and with an abandon akin to something out of the chemically assisted club scene, which is, I suppose, a clever counterpoint to Massinspired music.

But despite muscular performances by his eight dancers (the women better than the men), and some foxy costumes by super-culty designers, the relentless pace, and skin-and-groin aesthetic, soon yields diminishing returns.

The same goes for Lareigne, a dated-looking piece from 1996, although less so for Bud Suite, also set to four Wainwright songs (shades of kd lang here). Again we see hardcore Petronio moves, except the pas de quatre for four women, which was gentler and more subtle. And then you click. It's variety that's missing from Petronio's work. When he includes both light and shade, all is better revealed.