Comment on Dance: Sex and danger heat up Post:Ballet’s fall season program

Ballet’s first fall season at Z Space is highlighted by the West Coast premiere of a piece artistic director Robert Dekkers created for the Atlanta Ballet last summer and a world premiere that was only completed three days before Thursday’s opening night: The work begins with a trio of dancers (Christian Squires, Vanessa Thiessen, Jeremy Bannon-Neches) scuttling in a seated position across the stage like Eliot’s ragged claws, pulling themelves along with just one leg to the neo-Flamenco-like clapping of Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music,” performed live by The Living Earth Show. The dancers rise and extend in unison at first, but then repeating movements in precise succession, wave-like. Dekkers created “Yours Is Mine” for the Atlanta Ballet’s Wabi Sabi festival last summer as what he calls an unintended response to his 2012 piece “Mine Is Yours.” Set to Jonathan Pfeffer’s raggedly seething postmodern score, the piece begins with Squires alone on the stage, preening, stretching, almost feral until he’s joined by Aidan DeYoung who moves toward him, as if to attack, then nuzzles his neck. Dekkers has created a masterful study of possessiveness with “Yours Is Mine,” a meditation in movement on the theme of desire and ownership, wanting and having, and the shared dynamic of those factors in human interaction. “Sixes and Seven,” a solo piece danced by Tetyana Martyanova and set to Philip Glass music from Einstein on the Beach, is almost a variation in movement on the theme of “Flutter,” but now the obstacle is represented by actual numbers, counted repetitively aloud in the Glass score. Twisting her lanky, sinewy form and even miming solving a math problem at one point, Martyanova seems to be reacting to the numerical recitation as if it were a harsh light, her body bending downward, as if in pain, and then away. After an instrumental interlude of The Living Earth Show (Travis John Andrews and Andy Meyerson), the audience got a sneak peak at a full-length work in progress, titled “Do Be,” which will premiere in the fall of 2015. Tassel, the first of five segments of the work in progress, features the full company, along with TLES duo, arranged in a kind of living room setting. Set to a mesmerizing score by Anna Meredith, the piece begins with formal stillness, the dancers seated on a couch or at a table, but then builds to almost Marxist ( Groucho, Chico et al, not Karl) chaos. The dancers strip to neon-colored briefs as they work themselves into a frenzy, as if trapped by movement as the score transitions to rock 'n roll and the stage lights (by Jack Beuttler) throb.