Shivering, freezing, clutching at themselves, stumbling, the Motionhouse dancers enter the stage in the middle of an Arctic waste. The stage is bare except for a curved wall – a quarter-pipe – which is the backdrop for a projected vista of mountainous ice. It looks grim for the people caught here, but then the heat rises, the landscape begins to thaw, and Scattered hits its stride (really more of a sprint) in a constantly moving piece that whips through the different states and uses of water, taking us underwater, through snow and into deserts. Throughout, Motionhouse maintain an extroverted dance style that emphasises physical strength, the stage’s back wall becoming a runway for acrobatic tricks with performers sliding down and somersaulting across its smooth surface. No one is off stage for very long; you can feel how hard they’re working; everyone sweats.

Reflection and quietude are pushed aside by the relentlessly forward-moving front of the piece’s closely woven elements – the music is a constant thrumming presence, and the choreography is fluid and ceaseless, scene changes depicted by a change in the light, a shifted projection, and at most just a few seconds of deadtime before a performer runs on and pops a front somersault off the wall. It’s obviously a conscious decision, to sacrifice the beauty and resonance of the single image in favour of a fast-moving stream that maintains an overall, televisual sensation of energy and motion – and a significant majority of the audience loved it, really cheered for it.

I was a little less taken, and felt that for all that activity and frantic drive Scattered didn’t really cover much ground. Length is probably an issue, with the piece running to just over an hour – a long enough time to become aware how much work is being loaded onto the projections. They’re good projections; there were no technical problems the night I was there, and coordination between real performers and virtual worlds was tight: a dancer leaps up and hits the wheel of a tap, releasing a stream of water; a couple perch on a bench in an Arctic waste; a wired aerialist walks horizontally on the wall, circling a rent in the parched ground. The problem is that the projection is all that’s really used to create a stage environment: when the dancers, lying sprawled in a desert landscape, begin to tap the stage with their fingertips to simulate the sound of rain, it’s a relief to have a less literal depiction of the elements. Similarly, a couple of times fabric is released to roll down from the top of the quarter-pipe, working to add a third-dimension to a rushing waterfall or avalanche of snow – but these moments are few, and for all that the music and the choreography continue to run on, full-tilt, the architecture of the stage begins to seem increasingly static.

Amid all of this is some of the thinking that went into the piece – about the environment, broadly, and how it is despoiled. We see a river that overfills with supermarket detritus, and fish are replaced by plastic water bottles (the smaller ones chased off by a 10-litre whopper). I’m unsure quite how this fits with the grandstanding, spectacular character of the performance; one reading that works on paper is that the language of constant flux and movement represents our callow indifference to the world around us when compared to the fast-paced desires and needs of our social lives (and in those moments where the performers are robbed of energy, it’s always because of the weather, a big chill or fierce heat). Is it a cautionary tale? Perhaps in part, but when the audience applauded, some getting to their feet, you felt they were celebrating the athleticism and grit of the dancers, not the environmental message.

UK tour resumes in February