Mid-way through Fragments – Volume 1, I began to worry about choreographer Sylvain Émard’s state of mind. The work seemed so gloomy and bleak. A post-show talk revealed that his starting point for each of this series of short pieces was to ask the dancer what was most urgent in their lives right now. He built each dance around their answer.

For Catherine Viau, it was the feeling of being out of control in your life. Émoi, émoi, reprised here by Kimberley de Jong, is danced within horizontal planes of light, suggestive of an interior space, to a techno-industrial score by Michel F Côté. It’s part film noir, part sci-fi thriller as de Jong explores the limits of the environment, long limbs flashing through the dimness. You get the sense that she is seeking something within herself as she creeps and spins, kicks and pivots. De Jong is a graceful and skilled dancer but the choreography is technique-heavy with only occasional flashes of brilliance.

Monique Miller, a renowned actress in Quebec, was persuaded by Émard to make a piece called Absence, which she says is inspired by the absence of love in plays by Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller. Yet those plays are full of feisty women and it’s a shame that Miller isn’t given the chance to connect with the audience or express loneliness more powerfully than in this spare and delicate piece. There are some poignant moments – on a chair, her feet gently tapping to an inner rhythm, or folding herself into a ball, while breathy jazz saxophone plays and a lonely hearts text is read. It is always great to have older people on stage and hers was a dignified performance. Some challenge would have been refreshing and perhaps engaged the heart more fully.

Bicephale means double headed, and in the third Fragment, dancers Manuel Roque and Georges-Nicolas Trembly (his first time in the role) are two creatures having to determine their territory in order to survive. That sounds like relationship trouble to me, and in this longer piece the pair confront each other in a dynamic dance of pull and push, with twists, leaps and holds in a struggle for power, or perhaps for reconciliation. This is physique-led dance, showing off the body and testing its limitations. After an effective start – two backlit shapes slowly morphing into hipsters, hands stuck in pockets – it becomes rather worthy and repetitive. German composer Jan Jelinek’s score is all hiss, rumble and buzz, atmospheric but oppressive. Lighting design, for the whole show, is by André Rioux, and most effective in the first piece where it really shapes space.

Émard is a clearly capable choreographer but this was a well-produced, beautifully danced programme that twinkled rather than dazzled.

Dans mon jardin, a fourth solo dance, was skipped due to injury. The programme translates a song from it; ‘My garden was graced with swallows, poppies and butterflies. Now there are practically none left.’ Maybe Fragments – Volume 2 will be the sunny, second album.