Small Is Beautiful: Ten Tiny Dances

Disarming (Whitney Tucker): This opens with an audio clip from the Vietnam War about the body count rising. The dance makes a sort of repeating energetic visual pattern as the dancer talks about why she became a teacher -- she saw it as a slow-motion revolution -- and then shifts into a semi-comic "apathy dance": a kind of edgy, aerobic disco filling her personal space with high kicks. Powered by an angry bitterness, the dancer talks about how she "used to be angry" at things before she found apathy. An older man in a older tux with tails stands to the side; he seems a kind of instructor, bringing her back to reality. He closes the piece repeating: "Will you stand up?"

Ain't No (Drew Elliott): A veteran of Buttrock Suites III: Sweetest, Elliott's piece was danced to Bill Wither's Ain't No Sunshine. A sweetly formal dance showcases Elliott's technical prowess, while a slightly drunken swaying gives it character. The highlight is an impossibly slow fall backwards from the knees, slain by love -- an exercise in remarkable control that yet leaves him speechlessly vulnerable.

Contender (Zoe Scofeld): A pas de deux, the dancers appear in ruffled white little-girl blouses, black shorts, and powdered-white hands and legs (with a silk-stocking pattern), exhaling sharp pants while the Velvet Underground sings about hating the body. The dance is full of mechanical articulations of joints, painful looking hip rolls, stereotyped hand movements, and classical ballet moves. It's like a scene from ballerina school in hell, forceful but one-note.

The Sybil (Tracy Broyles): A strikingly statuesque woman to begin with, Broyles is dressed in flowing white, using the dancefloor as a plinth, her feet obscured by a litter of white pieces of paper. Moving at quarter-speed, she rotates, occasionally caught in a spasm that doubles her over. When that passes, she vocalizes, as if trying out sound. Later she collapses and begins to read gnomic phrases from the paper pieces. We had no clue on this one. The guy sitting next to us spun out this whole bride imagery thing, where her dress was wedding white, the paper frosting on a cake, and it was about trying to find her voice.

Perfect Strangers (Mike Barber): To the Carpenters song sung by Shirley Bassey, Barber and Jenn Gierada dance up some comic relief -- rollerblader/runner Barber encounters tennis-geared Gierada and an erotic sports-tango ensues, punctuated by their self-conscious preening. The pop dance elements had the crowd laughing out loud.

the remainder and the rest (Daniel Addy): Head-scratcher. Addy begins, seated, by making out with a bust of Beethoven (we think), then becomes fascinated with a metronome that keeps stopping. He starts it, it goes a few beats, then stops. Repeat. Next comes a low-altitude dance with the bust, scooting it around and scooting around it.

Ruby (Kristina Dillard): Joan Scott gives a terrific performance, dancing while reciting from Flannery O'Connor's A Stroke of Good Fortune. Presumably she's dancing Ruby's story, which is the moment when, reflecting on her mother's heartbreaking travails raising children, Ruby realizes she may be pregnant herself. The dance involves serialized gestures -- a lean forward with her head crooked in her right elbow (in grief, worry?), leg sweeps -- that create a sense of story knitted together by the body.

Constructing L:ies (Katrina O'Brien): Up after Ruby, O'Brien gives another wordy performance, a discourse on lying containing the key principles: "Know who you're lying to, and know what you're lying about." With copious examples of her own lies (and a nod to a contemporary master), O'Brien incarnates falsity with rolls, contortions, ducking, evasions -- she slides beneath the platform, emerges. It's endless, desperately complex behavior -- she uses her arm to frame a line, slaps it down again and again, a visual restatement, qualification. Her tone is blase, conversational, but the choreography disturbs the pit of the stomach.

Departure 4:45 (Amelia Reeber): Reeber performs a mystic dance to atmospheric music by Rory Martin. In a streaming platinum-white wig and silken shift, Reeber dances a portrait, using her hands to speak, somehow creating an ethereal sense though her feet are firmly planted, her steps measured and sure. It's beautiful. Trina Wright's lighting design is jaw-droppingly right.

Bringin' (Crispin Spaeth): Danced by Heather Budd (*sigh*) and Kathy Lawson (*swoon*) to Def Leppard's Bringin' on the Heartbreak, the piece we thought was going to be ironic had a great deal of heart to it. Yes, there were anthemic poses, butt slapping, hand clapping -- even a strobed climax with feline stalking. But this was also a strong, feminine re-appropriation of adolescent power pop, charged with its own yearning and heartache. The naive "heartbreak" gestures (hands thrown down from chest height to the waist, palms open) reminded us sharply of how well the body remembers those teen-aged hormonal spasms.