Technology can sometimes seem to take on its own life and sideline the people it is nominally assisting. That tension, even conflict, is the subject of Mirror, a new duet by Alexander Whitley, who has good form with choreographic deployments of digital, generative and VR technologies.

In black and white leotards studded with motion-capture markers, Gabriel Ciulli and Daisy Dancer wind themselves into spirals and symmetries that veer from closeness to counter-pull and back again. This unstable yet interdependent dynamic is interrupted by an impersonal beam of light that scans the space, and gives rise to rectangles flickering on the front cloth, like so many screen frames – a portal for the appearance of luminous digital doppelgangers that first echo then upstage the dancers, who now turn their attention away from each other and towards their ghostly avatars.

So far, so good; but from here, it seems the creative team have all turned in the same direction. The human drama still happens on some level (she leaves; he stays, angsty and alienated; she returns to reconnect), but is almost incidental to a long concatenation of scenes that float in spacey soundscapes and seem unwittingly captured by their own special effects – bodies multiplied, motion transmuted into dendritic flickers, shadows dissolved into cosmic dust. In short: technology wins, without good reason.

Human beings and bodies are more to the fore in Whitley’s version of The Rite of Spring, a kind of techno-primitivist sequel to Mirror that uses some of the same digital effects of multiplication and magnification, and takes place on the same set: front and back cloths for projections, a closed circle of light centre stage, now with a trunk of ropes at its axis like a makeshift maypole.

Five dancers channel Stravinsky’s totemic score, here played in a glitched and layered version that accords with the blunt edges and blocky spacing of their torques and lunges (Whitley’s choreography is uncharacteristically rudimentary).

Ciulli has another tortuous solo, and Elaini Lalousis is chosen for the somewhat anticlimactic sacrificial dance. One intriguing moment seems to connect a tight circle of dancers to an iridescent coloured ring, reminiscent of Meta’s AI icon – but it passes, like the piece itself, with its energies oddly dissipated.

• At Sadler’s Wells East, London, until 21 March