This is a theater of signals, like a fast-changing slide show of things we recognize and don’t quite recognize.

Short Form by Big Dance Theater, at Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, on October 14 and 15.

A scene from “Summer Forever” in Big Dance Theater’s “Short Form.” Photo: Paula Court.

By Marcia B. Siegel

One doesn’t go to see Big Dance Theater for the dancing, judging from the mostly under-30 audience at the ICA on Friday night. The big attraction was the intermission, an onstage party. In interviews, the company’s co-director Annie-B Parson said she disapproved of letting the audience leave the theater midway and break their concentration, so she and her partner Paul Lazar dreamed up the party as a performance in itself. Partying is something young people do very well, and offering refreshments along with a performance doesn’t hurt the box office.

Short Form, apart from the intermission, consisted of five dance vignettes. Big Dance Theater performers can do bursts of dancing, gesturing, speaking, singing, and faces at top intensity. The five little dances offered carefully wrought effects with no time for sustained reflection in between. This is a theater of signals, like a fast-changing slide show of things we recognize and don’t quite recognize. The actions I remember best are the tiny intervals of dancing.

The performance began with Summer Forever, introduced over the loud speaker by an actory voice. A woman (Timberly Canale) enters, bent over like an old person in a Japanese play. She picks up or drags various inexplicable props — a crude walking stick, a toy fireplace lit up inside, a sled packed with mysterious baggage. I don’t remember what she did, or anything about the text, credited to Sibyl Kempson, perhaps because the style takes some getting used to.

The Japan allusion brought back traditional plays I’ve seen (Kabuki, Kyogen, Noh), and also recalled the New York-Japanese choreographer Kei Takei, who used folklore to create a long cycle of movement dramas with characters who suggested universal themes. But this was different, busier but less metaphorical.

The Big Dance idea features mysterious costumes and objects, and resisted consecutive reasoning or sympathetic attachments. In Short Ride Out (3) dancer Aaron Mattocks, in white tights, made his way through the space with strange, emphatic gestures. His moves were all very clear. He often flung his arms and legs out to carry him into turning. He would be moving at high intensity, then come to a full stop, then start something else. A white gauze ballet skirt was lying on the floor. At some point he pulled it on and continued dancing, barechested, and perhaps more revved up. At some later point, he took off the skirt and continued.

The music, a synthesizer and percussion score by Tei Blow and Eben Hoffer, got louder, then ended abruptly. Mattocks stepped into a pair of flip flops and walked all the way around the edges of the white floor and left. The space had turned blue. (Lighting was by Joe Levasseur.)

Resplendent Shimmering Topaz Waterfall was essentially a mime piece for Lazar and Canale, with moves suggested by a page transcribed and anonymously annotated from a notebook of the Japanese Butoh master Tatsumi Hijikata. The audience was supplied with a photocopy of the page. It included specific instructions (“Set of 12 child movements”) and cryptic suggestions (“Willow annihilation”). The announcer-voice advised that the actors were aiming to cover all Hijikata’s directions during the ten-minute piece.

Lazar toddles on in a large, shapeless poncho, black-rimmed glasses, and a porkpie hat. He gestures with great conviction but no outer logic, as if telling himself a story that’s somehow leaking out. Canale looks like an old woman, perhaps his companion or his keeper, propping him up with walking sticks when he falters. After he leaves, she sits on a tiny camp chair, by a large tub into which water has been dripping one drip at a time from a hanging plastic container. She dunks her feet into the tub as if she’s been walking a long way, then steps out and begins a dithery mime sequence.

Mattocks and Elizabeth DeMent, in long, curly black wigs, white blouses, and leggings made of metallic cloth, are the actors and narrators of The Art of Dancing. Mattocks intermittently murmurs excerpts from Samuel Pepys’ diary into a microphone, relating how the author discovered dancing, hired a dancing master for his wife, got interested in dancing himself, and eventually began to suspect that his wife and the teacher were getting too familiar. Accompanying these story fragments, Mattocks and DeMent move decorously, with flashes of Baroque dance steps and poses that escalate into boogying.

A scene from “Goats” in “Short Form” by Big Dance Theater. Photo: Liz Lynch.

After the intermission hubbub, DeMent becomes a stage director, bossing around four other dancers in Goats, an eviscerated version of Johanna Spyri’s beloved 1880 novel Heidi. (Besides those mentioned, the cast included Jennie Liu and Enrico D. Way.)

The Swiss orphan girl, played in the first of many movies by Shirley Temple, is sent to live in the Alps with her hermit grandfather and gradually wins him over along with the whole village. The Big version, created by Parson and Lazar, is prop-filled and verbal, with interchangeable characters and illustrative sound effects. There’s a fake folk dance to cheery treble voices, a character who knits something with thick red wool, an improvised wheelchair.

The aim of Goats, like the rest of the pieces on this program, was to deflect the audience’s craving for a story with sympathetic characters, and focus instead on big effects and extreme acting. It’s Brechtian, and also Japanese, this distancing of personal involvement and empathy. In between the vignettes, stage managers in white clear the space and bring on props for the next event, another device borrowed from traditional Japanese theater. The dismantling of narrative reminds me of the deconstructive works of New York’s Wooster Group in the 1980s.

To counter all this alienation, Big Dance Theater tried to repair the rift by inviting the audience to share the stage, where they would accidentally become performers. Friday the audience enthusiastically trooped down to the stage to mill around, drink beer, play a little ping pong, and get interviewed by Lazar. The spectator/performers were quiet during the first part of Short Form, more appreciative after the beer break.

Internationally known writer, lecturer, and teacher Marcia B. Siegel covered dance for 16 years at The Boston Phoenix. She is a contributing editor for The Hudson Review. The fourth collection of Siegel’s reviews and essays, Mirrors and Scrims—The Life and Afterlife of Ballet, won the 2010 Selma Jeanne Cohen prize from the American Society for Aesthetics. Her other books include studies of Twyla Tharp, Doris Humphrey, and American choreography. From 1983 to 1996, Siegel was a member of the resident faculty of the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.