When I think of old New England, I think creepy: Native American massacres, repression-haunted folklore, a Thanksgiving without marshmallow sweet potatoes. Now merge all that creep with the garish force of several dozen tasty riffs and power ballads, and you’ve got something like Abigail, the Salem Witch Trials Rock Opera, a show as campy as a Boy Scout convention, with the sincerity to match.

It’s a happily ridiculous blend, enlivened by a cast of real-life pagans.

Created and premiered in 2010 by Michael Xavier, Daniel Knop, and team,Abigail‘s current version runs through Saturday night at Light Rail studios, in an especially desolate part of Bayview. Almost to a fault, the plot remains faithful to the facts and characters surrounding the mania that wracked Salem and environs for a year starting in 1692.

Before digging in, here’s some advice: Despite the 8pm showtime, arrive a little before 9 to avoid the never-ending witch-based folk-rock PowerPoint. By 8:45 last Saturday, latecomers stood blocking the view, people discussed rock-music things–”I didn’t know he had that many tattoos”–and someone spilled beer on my shoe. (Tecate, $3, lobby.)

Crushing on lead guitar is Kurt Brown, for whom every arpeggio is an excuse to blow the place apart. As co-writer of the score (with Knop), Brown blends the bellowing keyboards of Iron Butterfly with Jefferson Airplane’s melodic haze. And as Abigail, the world’s cutest heretic, Casey Castille carries the show with refined force. Castille, new to this year’s production, confidently folds rock-star conviction into wide-eyed, pigtail-chewing innocence. She’s past Abigail’s teenage years, but you don’t notice.

Other cast members seem pulled straight from the Haight Ashbury Street Fair (of which Xavier is the president). Lance Flynn makes a haphazard cameo as bad guy Lieutenant Governor Stoughton. He’s grotesquely pale, with red-stained teeth, and fits right in with a troop of Puritan fascists.

Abigail‘s early sections are easy to follow. First, Tituba, a slave, ropes local white chicks into pagan rituals, with fortune telling and frantic woodland dance parties. Soon, they’re caught by their minister, played brilliantly by the animated corpse (I think) of Daniel Knop. As teenage girls have done since apparently forever, they deflect blame onto other villagers, setting off a cavalcade of paranoia and recrimination. Terrified townspeople trip balls, and the first act closes as Satan reigns supreme over New England. In the shrieked words of one accused woman, “Village gone to hell–into the nitty gritty.”

Alas, a downside. As it progresses, Abigail’s convoluted plot feels both unavoidable and unworkable. I wonder how its writers could have conveyed the terrible scope of the trials without the stultifying legalistic play-by-play or so many characters. Plus, the slapdash staging leaves too many key details to be conveyed through song alone. Things can get a bit leaden.

Before intermission ended, the staging had me feeling a little dull. Plus, I had to pee. I opened the bathroom door onto a fleeing teenage boy buckling his belt real quick, then, oh hey, a girl, hand to mouth in a sheepish grin. “Looks like fun!” was all I could say. Cheered by the prospect of youth engaging more fully with the arts, I felt re-energized for the show’s lurid remainder.

Abigail’s ending is pretty happy too. Without giving away details, not all the good people die by hanging.

Writers Xavier and Knop, surprisingly attuned to the nuances of history and language, make rockers dressed as Pilgrims seem totally logical. They’re the opposite of nuanced in depicting the forces of good and evil, but subtlety isn’t the goal here. I mean, rock opera. Abigail is hardly Arthur Miller, but it does have power chords.

Abigail: The Salem Witch Trials Rock Opera, appeared at Light Rail Studios on August 20, 2011. This review was originally published in the SF Weekly’s Exhibitionist blog.

By the end of The Experience of Flight in Dreams, the latest work co-choreographed by Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton, extraordinary things had happened. ODC’s theater felt transformed. And as in dreams, those details of those extraordinary transformations seem dissolved in the waking memory. Sharp points remained though.

The work opened in a flurry of activity from all 15 dancers. Caught up in some great communal struggle, they took pleasure in the extension of their line, even when the extension rarely lasted for more than a moment. A score by various composers including Marc Mellitts and Jonathan Russell, played live by an ensemble of eight, felt as immediately rich on the ears as the movement did on the eyes. On risers at the stage’s rear, a “movement choir” laid down visual rhythms while the soloists pitched limbs from one corner to another.

Such busy unpredictability verged on the overwhelming, save for the balancing calm of its dancers—Dudley Flores, for one. Multiple times mid-frenzy, the choreography demanded a reversal of direction, and Flores turned not on a dime, but on a pinprick, with little more than some invisible wall in the air for support. Following another later crescendo of movement, soloist Tanya Bello launched into a lofty cabriole from her already high arabesque. My notes here contain multiple exclamation points.

Sometimes foregrounded, sometimes not, the movement choir was often strikingly, maybe intentionally, out of unison. Their raggedy, folding arms contrasted with the soloists’ frequent and furious thrusts of a single arm to the front, palm splayed outward. Especially with the work’s dusky lighting and thick velvety robes—red for the soloists, black for the choir—it was hard not to think of sorcery, and of the spells that dreams (the choir?) will cast over the living (the soloists?). The sense of ritual coursed through a later section. The movement choir, split into two parallel lines, fanned their arms backward quickly, as fast as the soloists could streak through the middle’s gauntlet, as in an initiation. Immediately after, in an evocative, if sentimental, sequence, the choir circled Flores—he’s sort of a main character here—and the dancers breathed heavily on his limbs. Limbs responded in kind, and Flores’ body advanced gauzily, impelled by dreamtime muses, toward the audience. It was a false ending, but lovely all the same.

Things turned zany. Nol Simonse grasped his own leg and jumps over it. Bello shrieked “Help! Help!” while tearing from place to place. Were people fighting or dancing? The work’s texture begins to suffer for a time, what with the false ending into yet another frenzy of technical proficiency. The score’s Balkan-style barnburner freak-out was a welcome refresher. As if coming down from the piece’s high, the chorus supported a dancer in a slow-mo airplane crash, complete with two or three bounces along the floor, as airplanes can do in dreams. Stillness took over. The chorus tethered their arms to Flores, who climbed up between them, headed for the stars, and for whatever people see when they dream.

Garrett + Moulton Productions performed The Experience of Flight in Dreams at the ODC Theatre in San Francisco on June 10, 2011.

After a rousingly wearisome experience attending American Repertory Theatre’s Sleep No More, a visit to the company’s current production, Paradise Lost, made for a soothing balm. Not that the play is slow, or tailored to the tastes of old people, or unexciting in any way. No, it even makes for a pretty awesome date.

The 1935 script by Clifford Odets—“Jesus of the proletariat” himself—crackles with charm and vigor, no less when its social realism veers into the earnestness of pre-post-modern America. Leo and Clara Gordon deal with the failure of their family’s handbag business, while friends and partners, working in a neighborly nucleus, hasten their own various dissolutions. Daniel Fish’s direction, amid a few tolerable anachronisms, downplayed Odets’ specifically Jewish, specifically Depression-era elements. In its place, I was startled to encounter a spooky, vaguely futuristic present that might yet visit whichever non-rich, non-famous Americans haven’t lost hope for wealth and fame.

My chief complaint (I think) with Sleep No More was that the production’s scenic and tonal elements blotted out any particular message or conceptual through-line. Which is part of why Paradise Lost felt so satisfying. Every aspect of the production coheres, even as the use of technology, in less capable hands than those of Fish and cast, might have threatened a pandering imbalance.

In form, “technology” amounted to little more than video projections, and actors speaking into handheld microphones, and a live motorcycle onstage, disappointingly un-ridden.

But in function, technology reframed the rules of Odets’ sinister game, in which an American family watches its shared dream fall to tatters. Some characters will have you believe the government is to blame, while others find no one but themselves to fault.

Either way, Odets wants to remind us that their dream is our dream. Fish appears fully aware of that. Early on, in a charming VHS-style recording of a wedding reception held for two young characters, we’re pulled, willingly helpless, into their starry-eyed orbit. It feels exactly like every wedding-reception-video in every entertainment hutch in America, down to the bitmapped super-title reading, I think, “Our Wedding.” The bride and groom, he an Olympic-medalist sprinter, mug for the camera astride Daddy’s motorcycle. They radiate the success of their promise, and the promise of their success. But even the video is a sort of hoax: we’re only seeing the characters’ fantasy of an ideal wedding; onscreen, the family resorts to mundane infighting, hardly worthy of celebration, and you start to realize that the whole thing never happened. This just stabbed me. The marriage ends up as I expected, then worse.

Characters dream that a better future is just within2 reach, often irrationally enough to suggest magical thinking. Themes recur on the ideas of fortune-telling and of time, or really of loss. At key moments, technology steps in to record the process of that loss. Sometimes it’s through live-capture, so that a physical discussion held just out of sight is broadcast in glaring fullness against the stage’s back wall. It’s hard to peel apart the layers of meaning here, and my Baudrillard isn’t what it used to be. Tangibly, though, the framing made for a fascinating, if familiar, effect where live theater stopped happening onstage; instead, in real life, shit was going down. (What an upstanding member of the MTV generation I am, when some enormous digitized thing seems more realistic and believable than the exact same thing occurring in the human-sized flesh.) For this production, the conceit makes sense: the past is idealized but decaying, the present is forever flawed, the future reneges on its promise; recordings embody the tension in triplicate.

There are some truly searing cases made here for the rights of an individual to question his government. Again and again, script and actor find their butter-rich match. But for me, the height of the show came when T. Ryder Smith, playing the Gordons’ batty, kind-hearted and abandoned son Julie, suddenly switched roles, turning into Mr. May, who sets fires to buildings so that his clients can collect the insurance money.

As Mr. May, Smith was capitalism incarnate, vicious, Nazi-like. Across the whole stage’s back, the camera showed this man as Julie’s opposite—by showing the video’s negative image. At one point, Mr. May tried to convince Leo that the handbag-factory was worth more burnt than not. The camera held its tight focus on Smith’s face, where stage-lights shined dark and his dark mouth flared white.

Suddenly, I think in response to some sincere and naïve statement, Mr. May’s whole face erupted in silvery surprise. And because the focus was so tight, and the video’s negative in play, we saw his lone ghostly pupil dilate in reverse.  It was a harrowing vision of an actor so in control, and of a scenic idea so calibrated, that nothing seemed fake for a moment, because an otherwise involuntary response had bowed to the demands of theater. We gasped, and shared the moment, reveling in its magic.

For its sensory impact alone, Sleep No More, a current production from Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre, offers a theater experience unlike any I’ve yet encountered.

In the production’s central conceit, audience members are free to wander the interior of Brookline’s Old Lincoln School, finding a building’s worth of site-specific performances and installations. Punchdrunk’s London-based directors, Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle, have made their name on a particular modus operandi: the company takes over abandoned buildings (usually institutional), and produces site-specific, audience-driven theater installations.

For Sleep No More, they drew their inspiration from Macbeth, with elements of Hitchcock’s film version of Rebecca. It was never clear how that affected what we saw, and for a time, the division didn’t matter. It’s pretty thrilling to follow one character or another, examine bookshelves and drawers for clues (to what, we never learn), or get as close to a performer as you want (who just might push you around a little). By tearing down traditional theatrical barriers, the show’s creators allow for an experience as unique as the course you take. From the beginning, you understand everything in the school, from books to old floor tiles to that funky classroom-smell, to be intentional, to be art.

Punchdrunk’s production is so rich in detail, and its daring is so obviously worthy of a theater-goer’s goodwill, that it’s tempting to absolve its creators of some major flaws in structure and execution. But I’m resisting temptation: Sleep No More was, for me, a deeply frustrating experience. (I should mention that I auditioned to be a dancer in the show, and was not cast.) Crucially, I may have slipped through the cracks by expecting performative dance work and getting something more like installation art. But with the directors running the show in either of those two directions, I ultimately found that one mode worked to undercut the other, fatally so.

Promisingly, it was hard to know where the “show” started—maybe it was when a woman on Boylston Street, streetwalker-style, materialized beside us and asked if we were looking for the A.R.T. show. (If that’s when it started, it made a fifteen-minute pause as we waited, awkwardly expectant, in the ticket line—though we were only a few minutes early for the 7:20pm entry.)  The show seemed officially, ominously, begun when we started down a maze of black halls, dark enough to obscure even the closest hand.* After a pleasing and minor kind of panic, we parted thick red curtains and came into a plush red barroom, complete with archaic liquors and a decent jazz ensemble. It felt so exact. I expected Jay Gatsby to wander by. For cheap, you could buy rum punch. (Get it? Punchdrunk!)

We were soon hustled into another hallway and, during an invigoratingly stern pre-show talk (basically, throw away your cell phone, don’t freak out too too much, and no talking EVER) given plastic Carnival masks—the Venetian kind with the long nose, worn by doctors treating victims of the plague. Apart from the anachronism (Renaissance Venice is not Jazz-Age Scotland), masks for audience members were a smart touch. First, they framed us as “actors,” complicit in this whole theater thing. Conversely, they removed from the overall experience any expressions by our non-actor selves. Any real-world reaction would too easily collapse the illusion. Made blank, we were ready.

For the two or three scenes that followed, Sleep No More worked enormously well. In the first two rooms, I poked through decaying maps, turned the working faucet on the porcelain sink and picked up a briefcase, appropriately heavy. I was in a state of wonder then. I’d been slingshotted from the 21^st century back to something 100 years earlier in time, but obscure and eternal in tone. Terror seemed to bubble from beneath the surface, pitch-perfect and just out of sight. Characters entered and communicated wordlessly, moving together in deep portent. Action and connection felt just around the corner.

Only a little action, and no connection, ever arrived. They were forestalled continually by little more than stunning imagery, creepy tone, and snail’s-pacing. This was the “installation” aspect talking. As the production continued, I came to see its slow-motion visualization of dread as part of some heavily coached and lugubrious self-importance. (The Old Lincoln School, in the show’s marketing, is “abandoned.” This is silly! If something is unused, it’s not necessarily abandoned. I know, marketers are marketing, and artists are doing something vastly different–but this show, in billing and in execution, asks me to believe in something that isn’t there.)

Between one character in one room and another character elsewhere, no matter whom I followed, I failed to understand the point of their presence. Tone alone does not make theater, nor do character studies committed in isolation. Put another way, I know there were some deeply considered connections between scenes or actors, but the course that I and my friend followed failed to illuminate anything approaching even one connection. Maybe I’m getting ahead of the show here. The avenues I saw for Sleep No More were so wide that its structure would need to resemble quantum mechanics for it to guarantee every audience member’s proscenium-style satisfaction. Maybe the show really only wants to provide a launching point for our rumination on dread and literature and how old things are creepy. If that approaches anything like the truth, and I’m thinking it does, this entire review is as overblown as the show. Or what about this: if this was installation art, it promised (and fell short of) too much narrative; if it was presentational, slam-bang work, dance and connection were all too infrequent.

And if both?  Well, an hour on, something like needlessness set in—after all, without a compelling reason, what’s the point of going anywhere? Why follow that guy? His last scene was pretty uneventful. Are any of these people Macbeth? (At one point I found a copy of Macbeth in a leathered-up library, and skimmed its introduction to remind myself of its theme. I was desperate! Soon, a black-masked attendant motioned for me to drop the book and get back to watching the play. Maybe in England, people know the generalities of Macbeth as we here know the generalities of Huckleberry Finn: in the blood.)

Repeatedly, I told myself to wait, that all would become clear, and that I would be let in on the story, or on the themes, or on some understanding of why these people are behaving this way, assuming that I would even see most of them again. Alas, in this sea of beautiful images, I only drifted farther from land. (Several scenes, including rooms full of piney Christmas trees and a WWI-era battle scene, were installed by the renowned artist Magdalena Campos-Pons and some visual-arts students at the MFA school. Awesome! But, gallingly, they felt underutilized, at least when I was present.) Bereft of any tissue to bind these scenes together, call it pacing, structure, characterization—an invitation to dream—we wanted to leave. And we left.  Although because it wasn’t clear if the show was at its end, assuming it had an end, I’m not sure if we left “early.”

Art doesn’t need narrative or sense for me to enjoy it. Richard Foreman, Sarah Michelson, John Cage—call me a fan. But this non-narrative work, and this installation, were of a different, careless order. Sleep No More rankles in its fundamental failure to deliver the basic goods of theater (as opposed to a jillion-dollar set design, where the show succeeds winningly, and distracts its audiences into overall awe). It’s especially frustrating because I don’t know where to place blame for the failure.

On one hand, is the direction at fault, for treating its audience so carelessly? Mysteries abounded, and not in that good, against-interpretation kind of way. That we were given program notes at the very end, through which I learned that characters from Rebecca were also in the show, meaning that for two hours I had doubly no idea who I was watching…that’s just shoddy work.

On the other hand, couldn’t the failure be my fault, for forgetting all of my high-school Macbeth, and for not reading up on it before the show? Or maybe I should recognize installation art when I see it? And “expect no more”? After ten minutes, I grew to despise the avidity of several audience members who literally ran along with the performers as they streaked from one room to another, peering from just inches away at their documents and possessions. Maybe, had I their drive to enjoy the show at the pace to which it occasionally aspired, I’d have seen a different show. Maybe I just need to stop over-analyzing things and enjoy the ride?

Either way, I’m pissed that a production could make me feel bad about myself, and about my ability to synthesize the information of drama. I have one consolation. Punchdrunk appears to have done at least six other productions that take over abandoned sites. Perhaps, with Sleep No More, the directors and the needfulness of such an original execution have parted ways? Because if there was any visceral reason for this show, or for its characters, I didn’t see it.

*Seriously, if a handicapped person wants to see this show, with its endless staircases and arbitrary logistics, how does the box office even respond? I want to call them and point out that I am legless and unable to see in the dark, just to hear the politically-correct arts-admin double-speak for “you will not be able to access 95% of this show, you’ll hardly see the rest, and you may also perish.”

Punchdrunk performed Sleep No More at the Old Lincoln School in Brookline, Mass., on Nov 10, 2009.

This review describes what I saw, as I saw it, and what I thought, as I thought it. Indulge me, the man is dead.

So, CRWDSPCR. (He always had great titles.) Those costumes are wild. Imagine some new Scandinavian countries, and those would be their flags. Let’s call that move the windshield wiper. Talk about cute, talk about those women. Everybody up there looks really smart. I want to like the score. Not there yet. (“Be patient,” he’d say, if saying anything. Or, “who asked you to like this?” All slippery.) Whoa, Robert Swinston is still performing. Good thing he’s awesome. (Cunningham danced in every show until he was 70. Swinston has several years still.) Supposedly the dancer most like Cunningham—like Cunningham in his prime—is Rashaun Mitchell. I’ll believe it. He just shot three feet up, easy as pie. Prime is what you make of it. Mitchell goes swish when he turns, yeah, like Cunningham. It looks funny, as in fun. Swinston has soul too, smiling or thrusting his pelvis or whatever. (Tattoo this on your brain: Cunningham had soul.) Wait! Maybe I feel ashamed? Because maybe I’m bored? Okay, not with Swinston, not with Mitchell. I guess that wasn’t boredom. I’m overwhelmed, distracted. Good art reminds me of philosophies for living. This one’s like “you never know what’s really happening, even as it happens.” (Is that true for death? It came in his sleep, I read. Still true there?) In no way is this score enjoyable. I’m letting go of trying, which is nice. That gaggle of rich summer-camp girls must be hating this stuff. Someone’s revulsion is palpable right now, it’s coming from them. A peek around proves it. Gymnasts stick a move and get more points. Same with these dancers. It’s been fifteen minutes. The DJ’s are just pounding those chunky old notes deeper and deeper. As always, the score is never identical, they started tonight and everybody—everybody—heard it for the first time. Everything happens without musical cues.  Feet speed up. Piggyback rides, five cents! A dog barks. The curtain closes, action going fast. Hey, I was just getting into it! I should learn what the term “hero worship” actually entails.

eyeSpace. This is the one where the audience gets crappy headphones and iPod Shuffles, loaded with stuff by Mikel Rouse. You’re supposed to play any track you want or let it go random. The music is good, sounds like Komeda or Architecture in Helsinki. I swear they just sang, “Let’s go shopping in the Gaza Strip.” (God, was Cunningham ever not cool?) Wait, there’s live music too? Ugh. That’s too much. Messing with the Shuffle means more distraction. I’m distracted. This part of the process should stay in the background. iPod’s getting shut off. Sure, I get it: Cage’s philosophy, Cunningham’s adaptation, says we’re all potential artists, everything can be art, nothing isn’t valid. But theirs is the point of view worth attention. I went to the theater for them, not for myself. (Now that’s all wrong. Why wouldn’t I be here for myself too? And what’s wrong with attending to myself?) One eyelid is pulsing to the music’s beat. It’s possible to find meaning in this. Either we’re all artists, or none of this is art. Certifiably, that backdrop is art. Day-um. One painting, Henry Samelson, Blues Arrive Not Anticipating What Transpires Even Between Themselves. Sounds about right, looks like a blue Laser Tag game shot holes through a red cartoon moon. Art: when movement, rhythmic or not, happens in silence, I listen for the rhythm reflecting itself in my mind. More shame! Cunningham’s movement seems more interesting when it’s fast. (“Don’t get down on yourself,” logic says. “Of course it’s more interesting. More output means more on your end, right?” Right, I’m good, I can do this.) Maybe I can play the Shuffle again? Sure. There’s a word to describe how this work feels sometimes. The word. Is. Ummmmmm. Self-abnegating. The dance is over, and of course the iPod doesn’t know or stop. (Usually at these moments, someone knows what to do, and when. Now I’m really missing him.) Second intermission, summer-campette dialogue: “The music is just weird, you know?” “It’s not weird, it’s just awful.” (Cunningham couldn’t have heard that on Saturday, having stayed back in New York. He watched opening night from a live feed.)

The major one, Sounddance, 1975, prime stuff. Fabric covers the back wall in something like Mother Ginger’s ballgown, in gold satin. A portal at center with hanging strips of satin, as at a butcher’s entryway. Enormous groans and farts and chirrups. Swinston shoots through, smiling, in possession of some serious knowledge. Something here feels evil. I can’t help but see this piece as a series of slashes in the fabric of something much older. Everyone is dancing with the right and left sides of their bodies. Mitchell hoists himself skyward while glancing sideways at a woman. This may be what swooning feels like. Take in the total scene, how busy and fertile. Dancers, as sea polyps, waft through a marine tableau to the right. I recognize this next section. Repeatedly, in unison, thousands of brisk and tiny jumps, speeding up as all join in (all but Swinston), all popping up and down, side to side, in rigorous joy. It’s the best kind of good. Everything is happening at once. The rhythm stays in my mind, in their minds. One by one, dancers slip back through the shivering strips. Seagulls cry. Swinston vanishes.

Much of Andrea Miller’s hour-long Blush, performed at Jacob’s Pillow last week by her New York City-based group Gallim Dance, feels familiarly unremarkable.

It’s easy to be suspicious of contemporary dances like this one, so similarly merging the stylish and awkward, usually in favor of the more-flattering former. Beside, for the piece’s first three-quarters, little of great note happens. In its final section, though, Blush made a gut-wrenching about-face, a change strong enough to recast everything before it as memorable, unfamiliar, even unique.

A single male dancer, moving in and out of a large square of white tape on the floor, opens the work. He moves slowly, in a heavy funk. Covered entirely in a thick white paste, and moving through theatrical fog, he has the vaporous presence of a ghost or a very old man. The music shifts to one of Blush’s many indistinguishable contemporary compositions and more dancers arrive, including three evil-looking ballerina-types. The three men, bare-chested, wear black bloomers, each with a giant Pilgrim-style buckle at center. All dancers are covered in the white paste, with lips and eyelids left red and raw. When anyone slides on the floor, friction scrapes away the paste to reveal fleshy, contrasting skin. Those rosy sores, and the general gloom, made me think of zombies.

Blush’s images are rich and inscrutable at once. The dancers muscle around, hurling themselves into the air and each other, seemingly trapped in a state of emotional cave-dwelling. Their pent-up limbs barely extend. Nobody enjoys any interpersonal contact. The strongly graphic poses repeatedly recalled cave-paintings, with their emphasis on brute, two-dimensional physique. During one of two lovely works for solo piano by Chopin, a few movement elements stood out. Once, a dancer bit her knee in frustration, and another did a fancy-stepping chorus-girl’s solo, in hopes of impressing a man. And that guy’s set of peculiar bent-legged jumps deserves description. He jumped up high with one leg to the front and one to the back, with the sole of his front foot slap-kicking the front of the thigh behind. It was hard to tell where the slapping sound was coming from.

For much of these sections, given the high-energy, portentous gloom, something seemed forever about to happen. When each new section passed without making good on that promise—with nothing to sink my belief into—Blush lost its energy. It was especially disappointing when the dancers, in the absence of substance, just glared their scary zombie-faces at the audience. Vinny Vigilante’s handsome lighting repeatedly resisted defining much of the action.

Later, there was an acrobatic male duet to Arvo Pärt’s damnably beautiful string work “Fratres,” which has, since its creation, been like catnip for seemingly every fifth choreographer. The work’s attenuated violins certainly complement Miller’s longing, with bodies that are both subtle and primal, but wasn’t there another (ideally shorter) work to fit the bill? Sexuality soon grew overt here—one man mounted his partner from behind, maybe quoting Classical vases, then they had a good wrassle. One climbed on top of his partner and, covering that man’s eyes, shouted out directional commands. At another point, one repeatedly bent his head low into the other’s crotch.

So, late in the game, it’s startling when all of that muggy frustration turns out to have been a preamble to something quite the opposite. When the shift comes, it’s as if the cave-dwellers turn out, in retrospect, to have civil minds, and their ape-like acrobatics reveal (in the memory) the human subtlety that Miller knew (but we didn’t know) was there all along.

Anyway, this monumental change happened precisely when the music shifted, this time to the massive Wolf Parade song, “I’ll Believe in Anything.”  Holy crap, did this song look good. Searing waves of melody rush ahead of its simmering percussion, and it’s powerful enough that to keep any steps noticeable in the din would seem impossible. But Miller did it. She has her dancers gulping up space, putting out as much energy as the towering song puts out. You want to shout, “They’re doing it! They’re finally doing it!” From the stage’s rear, rows of gold bulbs threatened to blind us; the music cast the option of deafness around the small theater; everything felt as it should. The singer addresses his need for someone’s eyes, for sunshine, and for “your blood, your bones, your voice, and your ghost.” Chills traced my spine. But suddenly, the dancers donned cheesy grins like they were in one of those old Gap commercials, very much out of nowhere. Hey, that was too easy! Like, if a happy song was all they needed, why didn’t they just play that song sooner?

That led to the work’s abrupt concluding moment, still in Wolf Parade’s storm: one of the women peels up the square of white tape from the floor, happily leading her happy mates like the Pied Piper into the resulting empty space, tape curling in trails around her. Of course, we didn’t know it was the tape’s presence that stifled them in the first place. But what a lovely, unanticipated image. It all made sense in the end.

Gallim Dance performed in the Doris Duke Theatre at Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, Mass., on July 11, 2009.

Occasionally you’re reminded why it’s good to keep expectations low. At Jacob’s Pillow in 2007, the Ballet du Grand Theatre de Geneve showed a mind-blowing double bill. It paired a feather-light ballet by Saburo Teshigawara and Loin, a 2005 dance by the Belgian-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.

In contrast to Teshigawara’s futuristic, nearly silent chilliness, Loin—French for “far”—was romantic and laugh-out-loud funny, using the touring dance company, the one performing right there, as a metaphor for cultural dislocation and xenophobia. Cherkaoui’s sinuous, intricate movement was a revelation, and the man himself seemed to merge the body of Gumby with (as we learned from texts of his, recited by dancers of many nations) the mind of, I don’t know, Lacan or somebody. In the intervening years, Cherkaoui has been a topic of that mysterious thing, “buzz.”

So, sitting down for one of the premiere performances of Cherkaoui’s Orbo Novo, performed by one of America’s best-equipped dance companies, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, I tried not to let the past egg on my expectations. (Nancy Walton Laurie, of Wal-Mart money, is a founder and backer.) Alas, the piece, like too much of Cedar Lake’s repertory, is one of those for which certain phrases exist, phrases like “half baked” and “let’s spend another three months in the studio.”

Orbo Novo has several outstanding traits: sumptuous sets and costumes, belly-laugh speeches by its dancers, alienation and togetherness in balance, and always those cursive steps. But these elements, on their own and in sum, felt much too familiar, as if Orbo Novo, more than merely being created by the same artist who made Loin, were a companion piece to its predecessor. The only new and unfamiliar element was a spectacular, three-dimensional set of metal gridwork. Wait, even the complete production of Loin had a lacy, Moorish-style metal screen at the stage’s rear. So Orbo Novo never convinced me of its own, stand-alone message. Though I was moved to recall the greatness, and then maybe the not-so-greatness, of Loin.

Orbo Novo finds its inspiration in the 2006 book My Stroke of Insight by the neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor. She recounts the experience of her stroke from her brain-scientist’s brain’s perspective. It’s a lot of science-y abstraction for one dance to make real. But for the first third of Orbo Novo, the transition works like a charm, plumbing this soul’s dark night with humor and pathos. (Early in the stroke’s ravages, Taylor is gazing at her hands and her body; she remembers thinking then, “Whoa, I’m a weird-looking thing!” This was hilarious. She also reported thinking, “I’m a very busy woman, I don’t have time for a stroke!”) These early parts of Orbo Novo are not really danced so much as spoken, in sentences drawn, with only a little condensing it seems, from Taylor’s book. It seems to be Cherkaoui’s style to use text in a number of languages, maintaining the linguistic traits of international dancers, and incorporating humankind’s usual stutters and pauses into the set text. When the dancers both move in Cherkaoui’s crazy way and speak in Taylor’s brain-science terminology, it’s often astounding, as if bodies couldn’t possibly do something this complicated. In the dance, anywhere from one performer to six or seven reports Taylor’s changing thought process: her surprise at not being able to move or think clearly; and her excitement that she gets to live her research so fully; and her profound bliss as the logical side of her brain falls away in what seems like Club Med for the other side, cruising between conscious epiphanies and senseless ignorance of anything at all. Imagine, being able to describe the exact workings of your own demise! For Taylor, this process lasted about four hours, and, though it took eight years, she made a full recovery.

The downfall of Orbo Novo is that, for its latter two-thirds, those initial four hours seem to be interpreted in real time. Once Cherkaoui moves from the humor and texture of Taylor’s hyper-aware intellect into his own contributions, the piece’s energy drains away into a desert of dry movement and even drier chamber music, by the Polish composer Szymon Brzóska and played live by the Mosaic String Quartet. For some time, that enormous, collapsible set piece keeps things interesting, or at least theoretically dangerous, with dancers climbing twenty feet in the air and hanging off by a well-placed limb. The set, and the way it divides the stage and the dancers, is a rich metaphor for the many facets of Taylor’s story. We see how mental divisions enforce physical distress, and how the body’s mortal curves grow overwhelmed by the cold, brutal logic of illness.

Some other things happened between the middle of Orbo Novo and its end, but soon enough I didn’t care about any of it. By the work’s end, the metal grid has been configured into two cubes—the two lobes of the brain, it’s obvious—that ultimately get pushed together by dancers inside each half to make a whole brain again. The dancers then leave these united hemispheres, save one guy, who struggles to push through a square hole without success. In the end, in a Herculean effort, he separates that section with himself still inside it, and pushes his way offstage, caged. With the dance finished, I happily found it much easier to stand, and walk, and leave the theater.

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet performed in the Ted Shawn Theatre at Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, Mass., on July 12, 2009.

There’s a chance you’ve already seen the collaborative work of performance artist Juniper Shuey and choreographer Zoe Scofield, in a music video for Dave Matthews’ 2007 song “Eh Hee.” Matthews, seated in a barber’s chair, grimaces and mugs while demonic figures dress him in Mozart’s wig and Chaplin’s hat, cover his face in all kinds of muck, clean him off, and dress him up again. At his side is a coven of dancers, Scofield among them. In quasi-Butoh regalia, they creep through drifts of white powder, posing and writhing to the song’s itchy rhythm. The song isn’t one of Matthews’ best, but Scofield and Shuey’s manic routine comprise four and a half of his most fascinating minutes.

In their group’s Boston debut, zoe|juniper performed the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t on February 20 and 21 at the ICA, presented by World Music/CRASHarts. Zoe Scofield is a 1997 graduate of the dance program at Walnut Hill, the prestigious arts high school in Natick. Juniper Shuey, whose background is in theater, studied set design at Emerson College before moving to the Pacific Northwest, where his career has blossomed. Since 2004, the two have been making dances in Seattle (home also to Dave Matthews).

At an hour long, the devil can’t help but remind you of its creators’ time in music video-land, not only because it looks like the Matthews piece. This dance’s weak spot is the very strength of so many music videos, where over-production is nearly an end goal: the attractiveness of the aesthetic trumps whatever sense the work, specifically its choreography, makes.

But what an attractive aesthetic. From the start, I wanted to find myself transported by this work, and for a time, I was. There’s a rich moment just after the beginning, when a scrim with a projection of falling, staticky snow suddenly drops to reveal—with bracing clarity—a grid of once-fuzzy dancers behind, doing rigid steps in unison. When the choreography after that moment held no similar brilliance, things fell a little slack, recovering only in fits. The work wants to be a grand and insensible dream, from which its dancers slowly awake. But dreams and dances follow different standards. With incisive images and opaque, aimless messaging, dance and dream feel frustratingly conflated.

Overall, the production feels impeccable. Morgan Henderson’s score blends delicacy and propulsion—think of Tortoise’s early work, with grand lo-fi washes. Shuey’s design is spot-on in color and execution—so much that Scofield’s choreography grows washed out by comparison. Scofield herself dances like she’s bewitched, a fascinating mix of Parker Posey and some carnivorous bird. Christiana Axelsen, blond and tall, is also a bold presence, muttering to herself while dancing; Scofield gives a little sneer when she’s tearing through one of many tricky bits.

Chrissy Wai Ching’s costumes carried the night. As the devil progress, and its dancers’ characterizations shift from uniform and pure to frantic and personal, the costumes grow more colorful and ratty. By the end, each dancer resembles a distinct species of prehistoric parrot, their preening accentuated by florid bustles. (And panties made of thick brown fur. Believe it.)

Shuey’s design for the conclusion has stage-snow—confetti—pouring down, first of a clear material, then in black. It was a photo of this gorgeous, vibrant moment that sold me on seeing the show. (I suppose that’s like buying a CD after watching the video.) For those snowy moments, Scofield’s movement is cathartic and primitive, and the live-action snow is a clear, if facile, response to the opening’s digitized version. But catharsis soon turned into dancers just ravishing themselves nonstop. Maybe four times, they halted to do a slow, evil peer from one side of the audience to the other. But once was really enough, especially when you’re never clued in on the peer’s point.

To Scofield’s credit, she has a great sense for how classical line can carve out the body’s appeal, and the choreography is kin with the rest of a visually fruitful collaboration. But Scofield uses ballet’s fashionably floppy version to an extent that risks numbing the eye, draping about fifteen minutes of ideas over an hour’s worth of ambition. When Henderson’s score turned percussive, the steps seemed to find a vitality beyond the trace of their creator, but briefly. These steps—drawing from standard contemporary ballet early on, and turning to primitive flailing near the end—are doomed to underwhelm when surrounded by so much exoticism.

Ultimately, the work’s message seemed delivered by the costumes’ gradual changes, from the opening’s blank uniformity to the closing’s colorful birds, and by those dual versions of snow. Could they be hinting at how we find individuality in a regimented society, by disregarding external concerns? If so, that’s no groundbreaking thesis. What’s more disappointing isn’t that the choreography wasn’t the work’s prime messenger—there’s nothing wrong with tipping the balance of a production—but that the choreography didn’t help deliver the message. Movement shouldn’t need scenery or costumes to clarify, only to deepen. And though the elements of a successful collaboration may well be inextricable, no element should fail to make sense without its mates.

Contemporary dances, of late, seem to set, and fall into, such a trap: long on visual imagination, short on physical messaging, dissatisfying by the end. Blame music videos or the Internet. Or blame how decreased attention for concert dance finds choreographers needing to “sell” their work through just a picture or blurb. More directly though, the teaching of contemporary dance composition seems to have stagnated in America, restricted to universities and well-off schools. So when young and ambitious American choreographers want a revolutionary production, visuals flow freely—after all, we’re the birthplace of Andy Warhol and MTV—while ideas go lacking. But the meat of any choreography, abstract or not, is not its generated image but its generating idea; failing ideas rich in associations, or the ideated structure to pull off purely imagistic work, the most you can hope for is revolutionary-lite. These lopsided dances draw handsomely from contemporary art for a saleable, if trendy, aesthetic. Who though can really say what they’re about? (Last year in a church in New York, I saw a dance with plastic greyhounds, bared breasts and neon lights; it could have been a satire of some Joseph Beuys-Dan Flavin collaboration, except that it conveyed nothing so rich, and wasn’t satirical.) Is it too much to ask for some image-idea parity?

I’m heartened by our piss-poor economy though. In the arts, desperation has a way of breeding invention and distilling voices. So I hope to hear more from Scofield soon. Maybe she’d break through by occasionally making dances on her own.

zoe|juniper performed at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art on February 21, 2009. This review was originally written for Big Red & Shiny.

Let’s face it. The word “slut” has some negative connotations. And while it’s hard to pull off a modern-day update of any classic production, The Nutcracker poses a special challenge.

So my hopes were pint-sized for The Slutcracker, a burlesque rendition of the holiday classic that appeared at the Somerville Theater last weekend. But hey: not only is this show dead fun, it’s well made. And as its droves of cheering, increasingly drunk audience members would confirm, a moribund concert dance scene could learn a little something from The Slutcracker’s example.

The show’s cast was among its many strengths, comprising Babes in Boinkland, the burlesque collective run by Slutcracker choreographer Vanessa White (nomme de pastie Sugar Dish), several hula-hoopers, dancers from Big Moves, and assorted freelance artists from all over Boston and Cambridge. Other highlights included White’s overt (yet somehow subtle) eroticization of the Tchaikovsky score’s most beloved touchstones. It’s not something you’d notice if you didn’t know The Nutcracker from an early age. But for those of us who think of The Nutcracker as a kind of movement-based grandparent, the subversion is mind-blowing.

For a plot, White’s basic conceit is simple. Whereas The Nutcracker turns a phallic symbol into a real man, who then shows its adolescent girl lead a good time, it’s much the same with The Slutcracker. Except this phallus is a real dick. Well, a vibrator, given to Clara (played for once as an adult, by an adult) as a gift from her batty grandmother, played by Mary Dolan, who herself is a stage character (I hope) of supremely bizarre appeal. The first act closes with Clara getting roundly rogered by her new toy. (That is, by the toy’s manly incarnation, The Slutcracker himself. His fleshy costuming looks a lot like Zoidberg, the lobster thing in Futurama.) Of course her meathead fiance is threatened by another schlong in her life. He even takes back her engagement ring. Throughout the second act, the Slutcracker snuggles up to Clara, who, post-cracking, hallucinates a cast of characters. There’s the sexiest Arabian dance you’ve ever seen, as well as Sugar Dish’s fantastic Dance of the Reed Pole, which gets her whirligigging on an actual pole. The ballet closes with a satisfying, empowering hurrah, as Clara’s fiance decides to welcome the vibrator into the couple’s new life. We’re left to imagine their pas de trois.

Beyond The Slutcracker’s solid narrative devices and characterizations there was something else just as heartening: its audience, which bought up most of the house a day in advance. This is the group–young and involved and paying–that any smart presenter should have been slobbering over after the show, with leaflets for that other nut-based spectacle and cross-promotion aplenty. But nothing.

Oh well, at least White’s hip to an idea that traditional choreographers would do well to remember: there’s more to dance than looking uniformly pretty and dredging up the same failed ideas, whether on stage or in publicity. Why can’t a well-made dance have sluts in it, and hula hoops?

The Slutcracker appeared at the Somerville Theater in Davis Square, Somerville, on December 13, 2008.