Following Lynn Shapiro into the heart of her dances is a little like the trip through the overgrown forest to find the Sleeping Beauty. One pushes through to the clearing to find strange dreams and memories. That was the case with "Jynxed," a program presented by Ms. Shapiro and her impressive performers on Thursday night at the Bessie Schonberg Theater.
Ms. Shapiro knows how to keep a narrative thread going, though her stories are not linear or even anecdotal. She has a strong but understated sense of theater and, rare gift, a feeling for succinctness.
Her new "Cassandra," danced to music by Erik Friedlander, is a portrait of a bad-seed adolescent seer with a great capacity for introverted pleasure, a lost and evil child who is definitely not of antique times. Dressed in a see-through blouse and tight black velvet pants, with wet hair and a clenched body, this Cassandra does cover her eyes, but she also smokes, twists her hair, pulls out a tooth and masturbates delicately. "Come on, read my future for me," a taped voice whispers. In a performance of extraordinary boldness and subtlety, Romina Pedroli suggests that it is the future that has made this Cassandra so filled with modern-day anxiety.
Marlon Barrios and Niles Ford are just as fearlessly strong in Ms. Shapiro's new "Charades" as they fight with and protect each other in movement filled with drama and punchy acrobatics. But this is not the average portrait of battling siblings or lovers, or even the standard male acrobatic duet. "Charades" is danced to two taped monologues written by Joe Frank of National Public Radio, in which women talk idiotically of relationships gone wrong. What have the dancers to do with all this? Only Ms. Shapiro knows, but she makes the dance seem a weird acting-out of the tales. And their juxtaposition feels profoundly revealing.
The company was completed by Franz Ottl.