By Debra Cash

Choreographer Heather Stewart’s use of the stage space, while not “immersive” by the standard art world definition, is inventive and meaningful.

Noisefloor, PALAVER STRINGS + little house dance. Presented by Global Arts Live at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, November 9.

A scene from little house dance’s Noisefloor. Photo: Kari Mosel

Maybe it was my experience of the recent Presidential election, but the opening image in Portland, Maine-based little house dance’s Noisefloor seemed to me to be a shape that made instability foundational. The dancer — in this case, a woman, but choreographer Heather Stewart’s dance language is resolutely genderless, without even making accommodation for performers of different statures — balances on one knee, the other leg an isosceles brace. Her palms face front, empty and severe, as if she were a saint in a Byzantine icon. Little house dance’s eight dancers will continue to return to this position and its lunging variations, crawling on their knees, sending invisible vectors of energy from their open palms across the stage in a silent communication throughout the performance.

Their partners in this strangely quiet world are the recently Grammy-nominated musicians of PALAVER STRINGS. Costumed like the dancers in silver pants and spangled sheer clothing over dark underclothes (by Elizabeth Moore and Stewart), and thoughtfully lit by Harrison Pearse Burke, who creates different regions of shine and gloom without ever obscuring the dancers’ bodies, the string players wait in the background in a shallow semicircle behind the dancers, cellos playing a repeated ascending and descending scrape. But wait! There are more of them: violinists walk from corners, making sharp plucking statements on their instruments to announce their arrival.

Courtney Swain’s score, the result of a process where, according to the program notes, the dancers were involved in the composition process and the musicians involved in the movement ideas, is meant to be “an atmospheric cave.” (It is, but of course you could claim that about a Shostakovich symphony, too.) What’s intriguing is the way the score does indeed become a floor for the movement to propel itself against rather than background accompaniment or a series of illustrated musical motifs. At one moment, when the music is a soft, slightly dissonant drone, the dancers’ bodies break into almost stroboscopic isolations, each part of the body moving with pneumatic specificity. In another, a sweet melodic riff has the dancer twitching his shoulders like a dog shaking off water.

PALAVER STRINGS in Noisefloor. Photo: Kari Mosel

It’s all very mysterious, but the undercurrent is one of sorrow and struggle. In a duet, dancers push and pull against each other, just this side of open conflict. In a solo, a kneeling woman puts her hands over her face as if blinded by acid or distress. Together, these excellent performers move with unflagging communal intention.

Stewart’s use of the stage space, while not “immersive,” by the standard art world definition — the audience isn’t asked to move nor are we overwhelmed by trendy projections — is inventive and meaningful. In one vignette, all of the performers cluster together in their shiny clothes until you can’t tell them apart. As the musicians step back, the dancers crook and straighten their arms, a fleeting echo of the violinists’ bowing and their bows.

Noisefloor may have had its origins in a collaborative process, but apparently no one wanted to kill their darlings and edit out any cherished elements. The work has a number of false endings. After about an hour, it reads like one of those durational videos you see in a curtained-off corner of a gallery that runs in a loop: you can set yourself down at any juncture, take in the atmosphere, and then walk away feeling that you’ve seen it all.

Debra Cash is a founding Contributing Writer to the Arts Fuse and is also a member of its Board. She was executive director of Boston Dance Alliance in 2019-2020 when Heather Stewart received a Boston Dancemakers Residency from BDA in collaboration with the Boston Center for the Arts, but was not a member of the panel that selected her as a grantee.