Having partied their fifteen minutes at Warhol’s Silver Factory (The Factory, 2010), Earthfall’s latest takes them downtown to that other hub of New York 60s bohemia, the much-storied Chelsea Hotel. The second law of rock’n’roll thermodynamics states that lived history and myth, once mixed, cannot be un-mixed and the piece is preoccupied with strategies for inhabiting the rented, provisional, pre-furnished space of received mythologies (romance, rebellion, sex, drugs, etc) and calibrating just how much it’s cool to worry about the bloodstains former residents have left on the carpet. Chelsea Hotel is, in several senses, about vacancy.

The central vacancy is narrative. This is a show pantingly concupiscent for story… in the same breath as it chastely disavows its necessity or even possibility. Story smokily haunts every interstice, every hallway and lift shaft of the piece, but the plot is sedimentary rather than summational: hotels in general, and this one most especially, are spaces where fragments of many stories intersect without finding resolution. Scene by scene, scenario (a strait-laced couple arrive at the Chelsea unawares, a resident is erotically obsessed with a neighbour, etc) is in constant conference with a palimpsest of famous-resident myth. Minxy hints are scattered throughout that the action is underpinned by precise incidents, but the apparatus required to decode specifics is withheld. Context shifts tectonically in a fraught boy-girl duet, when an aside names the female partner Nancy – but only for those who know how the tragedy of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen played out in a Chelsea bathroom. Such crumb trails seem calculated to cleave the audience by their subjective frames of reference (and familiarity with the stories of Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Dylan Thomas et al), and one clear faultline is generational: the Chelsea Hotel mythography arrives ready-made and pre-sold to the generation of the artistic directors, less so to the performers and still less the predominantly student-age crowd.

The piece is, then, resolutely an open text and cultivates distraction as a method. Events parallel to the main action are constantly in motion: an out-of-play character singing along to the soundtrack, a blink and you miss it eye contact from the shadows, a leg idly swung. The composition is always for four bodies – even when three of them are ‘offstage’ on stage – and never relaxes its syntactical choreographing of the central and the peripheral. The eye is encouraged to prospect for detail and rewarded generously.

The original score, a deft essay in the non-specifically familiar, structures the 70 minutes explicitly as an album of 3-6 minute numbers, and the presence of musicians Frank Naughton, Sion Orgon and Felix Otaola on stage is decisive. Diffident despite the leather trousers, sheltering behind the brim of a cowboy hat, the musicians bring a provocative contrast in concentration and embodiment, and if the piece hasn’t quite worked out their physical relationship as bodies on stage with the dancers, this turns out to be a welcome injection of serendipity. One of the most satisfying moments was the fortuitous recapitulation of a centre stage duet of mutual obstruction when a third dancer, unlit, upstage, had to dodge around a musician whose back was turned, his attention absorbed in playing.

Stage right to left, you’re looking at: an iron bedstead, a chair, a refrigerator, four chairs around a table. Mike Brookes’ set aggressively resists the decorative, but is a self-effacing masterclass in the creation of space for dancing. His wilfully tough-on-the-eye jumble of down-at-heel furniture shatters the yawning Quays Theatre space into tiered sub-stages crackling with energy, without needing to be more forthcoming about the specifics of what and where. This is representative of a mise-en-scene which forgoes conspicuous theatrical syntax (no scene changes, no wings, only the most tactful shifts of lighting) and the pictorial (although unfortunate exemption is granted to the projected imagery) and urges us to believe that the dancers conjure their effects from thin air. This is artifice, a pose, but it’s endearing to see a show so in love with its cast.

This is clearly requited by the performers, who hurl themselves at it headlong. Much is made of the negotiations between persona and autobiography co-inhabiting a body, and if the cast look too vigorous and fresh-faced altogether to convince in the sleazier scenes this itself becomes content, myth exposed as a sometimes ill-fitting hand-me-down. Necessarily, physical type and costuming limn character in broad strokes and the piece isn’t above relying on device – unisons to contrast, for example the articulate gossamer line of Jessica Haener against Rosalind Haf Brooks’ tensile attack, but there is also a richness of playful detail – the men’s costumes need no further differentiation than rodeo boots versus battered Cons.

Leonard Cohen’s lyric from Chelsea Hotel #2 proposes a workable synopsis of the genre-defining trope of dance theatre: ‘I need you. / I don’t need you. / I need you. / I don’t need you. / And all that jiving around.’ If you hug me, be warned that I will plié out from under your embrace; when you duck the arm with which I block your way, you’ll oblige me to grab for your heels – don’t worry, what we have here is legally marketable as dance theatre – but the company work hard to make this pre-chewed vocabulary tell. Alex Marshall Parsons’ character may be the only one surprised when, as he throws himself again and again to the ground, Sebastian Langueneur intervenes to catch him, but on these specific bodies, in this specific moment, it is fresh, tender and affecting. Elsewhere, the vocabulary is pleasingly 2013-idiom contemporary, all graphic, rippling Schechteresque silhouettes, candidly in dialogue with vernacular movement, and happiest at full pelt.

There is something self-serving about embracing lack of clarity as an artistic virtue, but Chelsea Hotel sets out to evoke an atmosphere, and on these terms is a woozy success, an indistinct but intoxicating cloud of patchouli and sweat. The game of three-card monte, playing myth off against biography and fiction delegates meaning-making (indeed, sense-making) to the audience, and its tricksy solicitation to over-read (Is that a sneer, or a Sid Vicious sneer? Is that a Manzarek organ tone or just a preset?) is an un-worked-for way to accrue meaning… but then that’s rock’n’roll, baby.