Over the weekend Velocity Dance Center was hosting SCUBA 2007, a national tour highlighting up-and-coming choreographers. (Next up for Velocity is their Annual Bash on June 3, hosted this year by Sarah Rudinoff.) Friday night the Velocity space was packed with modern dance fans -- we suspect that, like poetry readings, the modern dance audience is roughly congruent with the set of area performers and their partners. We'd say it was standing-room-only, but they ended up getting mats out and laying them down for people to sit on.

Things kicked off with the Zoe Scofield/Juniper Shuey Find your own way out, which they've adapted from there ain't no easy way out. This mist-shrouded, Asian-influenced version runs 45 minutes, and while it's still got its dramatic atmosphere and disciplined, clean dancing, it felt to us like a dilution of the earlier work, over-workshopped. Especially with this more dynamic, upbeat close, the piece lost a little of the ominous limbo setting that gave context to the shifting ensembles (Christiana Axelsen, Ezra Dickinson, Maika Misumi, Kate Monthy, Zoe Scofield). It's not always a benefit to have the choreographer dance their own work, but with Scofield it is -- she's rigor incarnate, to the tips of her fingers, but all fluid grace at the same time.

She was followed by LEVYdance, a group from San Francisco. Holding Pattern was a work for a trio (Christopher Hojin Lee, Scott Marlowe, Lauren C. Slater) and their bursts of athleticism brought gasps from the crowd. Initially, the trio was a twosome with a third watching, and refreshingly the couple was not always accepting of each other's gestures, pushing back, suddenly giving in, a body tumbling, shooting across the other's back. The three swapped places from time to time, the tension never letting up -- and then the piece ends. The second work was solo called If this small space, a solo performed by Lily Dwyer while standing in a square of light to the music of something frying in a pan. It's weirdly compelling to see but hard to discuss (we're finding). At one point we wondered if it was about a visit to a tanning salon, but abandoned that notion, given the range of movement.

Here was intermission and we heaved a sigh to see how late it was (the whole show ran about two and half hours, which we found too much for our feeble powers of concentration). Plus, it was hot in there. But the liveliest entry came last: Pear Cowboy Planet (Redux), a kids-playing-cowboy-movement-artists-sleepover. As much a kind of comedy performance art as dance, it features four men (Justin Jones, Jeff Larson, Zach Steel, Chris Yon) re-enacting a childhood sleepover -- Charlie and his friend playing at cowboys (or at indicating, via modern dance pose, that they're cowboys, or trucks, or horses) while ducking Charlie's angry dad and evading the news that Charlie's mom has cancer. Even if his mom's cancer can feel like just grabbing for something bad that can happen to moms, the work succeeds in bringing you into Charlie's peculiar, reality-resistant world, with its moments of synchronicity, joyful riffs on line-dancing.