Each of the five diminutive dances on Caitlin Corbett’s program at Green Street Studios last weekend proposed a different idea about how to see dancing. Once the point was made, the dance was over. Right where another choreographer might have finished the exposition and gone on to develop and elaborate the theme, Corbett stopped. What she was asking us to look at was movement and how it’s done by different dancers. For her this seems to be an absorbing and sufficient agenda.

In Rock, Scissors, Paper, Mia Keinanen, Erin Koh, and Kaela Lee moved in and out of unanimity. Even though there were only moments of identical movement, the women seemed to be in close accord all the time. One would split off and work in counterpoint. One would push another, who would fall onto the third. I remember one quick sequence where two of them framed the third, as if they were the back-up for a star.

Their movement was very active but expressively neutral, as if it would be cheating to emphasize or comment on what they were doing. Often, beginning with a gesture of the arm, they’d lead one whole side of the body into a pivot or a tilting fall. Or they’d twist so abruptly, they’d have to jut out a leg to stay on balance. Except for the moments where they broke off a sequence and jogged to another spot and begin again, their movement wasn’t anything you’d encounter on the street. But it wouldn’t take much of a mental leap for the viewer to see them metaphorically, engaged in games of power, affection, solidarity.

Corbett’s duet with Koh, Without Word (1998), the only piece on the program that wasn’t a premiere, took a similar noncommittal approach. But the movement seemed stronger, more angular, and it was colored by the familiar vocalise of Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5. When the unnamed soprano on tape went into the darker, descending chromaticisms of the middle passage, the dancers drew even closer together than they’d been, and one repeatedly fell into the other’s arms.

Jump, Corbett’s duet with her 12-year-old son, Seth Corbett Myer, was more literal about the dancers’ relationship. Working side by side and almost always in unison or close canon, they did simple things — gestures, two-legged jumps, big striding traveling steps. Occasionally she’d throw him a glance of encouragement, and he’d look pleased, proud of what he was accomplishing. I found it fascinating that the boy seemed to be moving so much more than the woman even though they were doing the same things. Whereas she knew how to economize, conserve energy, use only the essential parts of the body apparatus, he was tentative and a little bit diffuse, and unexpectedly graceful.

Two bigger pieces asked us to process multiple strands of information. Irene Lutts began Girl and Letter with a solo where her body wafted and wriggled, led by one arm. She could change direction and bend in the middle, but she didn’t leave the spot where she’d begun. A voice on tape drifted in and out, describing a girl standing by a window reading a letter.

Lutts continued this action as Brian Crabtree and Alison Ball appeared behind her, doing some flat, linear movements and back-and-forth walks. Then three teenage girls arrived behind them and ranged through some cheerleadery moves with loud stamps and falls. Finally four non-dancer men did a phrase possibly derived from sports movement.

Each group stayed mainly in the stage plane where it had entered, achieving a kind of four-part harmony with their four different types of movement. All the performers wore cassette recorders that played the Girl and Letter tape at different times, so the soundtrack became a verbal canon. Once all this was established, the piece ended.

I had less success grasping the structure in flying, falling, an eight-dancer combination of music, film, sound effects, and voices. Ann Steuernagel’s score was particularly intriguing — piano music tracks by Ravel and Ives were laid on top of each other to create a dissonant new composition. There was a videotape loop of a crow flying, a swimmer and some divers shot from below, a flower opening in slow motion. And intermittently there were muffled voices and a drone like a vacuum cleaner. The dancers moved in counterpoint groups that changed their constituency, but the dance ended before I really took in what they were doing.

IN JOSÉ MATEO’S NUTCRACKER (through December 30 at the Sanctuary Theatre in Harvard Square) the mice scamper around harmlessly. The fairies twirl on their toes. Drosselmeyer looks imposing, and the toy soldiers, cherubs, and polichinelles almost keep in time with one another. Nobody does very much in this production except show off his or her dancing. In other words, in a ballet that’s known for its story — at least the first act — Mateo’s characters seldom engage in any narrative action. The plot is not so much taken for granted as buried or submerged.

Mateo’s aim seems to be to concentrate on dancing. He reveres the example of George Balanchine, who not only summarized the story lines of classics like Coppélia but created plotless glosses on La Sylphide (Scotch Symphony), Napoli (Donizetti Variations), Swan Lake, and Raymonda. Balanchine could erase traditional stories because his choreography had its own drama. His physicalizing of musical structure through the ingenious application of classical ballet steps and the performing of virtuosic dancers, down to the back row of the corps de ballet, could be at least as suspenseful and rewarding as the boy-girl-predicaments of the classical stage. The Nutcracker is practically the only 19th-century scenario he kept intact.

Rather than asserting itself as traditional, innovative, or revisionist, José Mateo’s Nutcracker teeters between objectives. His Ballet Theatre has turned the Old Cambridge Baptist Church into a credible dance space, the Sanctuary Theatre, but the audience is ranged very close to the performers, with no real separation between worlds, as in a black-box theater. Foreshortened from the rising rows of seats, the big scenic elements look crowded, though the floor area is generous. For the theatrical illusions preserved in this production, you need distance. It’s better not to be able to see how the effects work or how the dancers sweat.

The ballet doesn’t settle into its signature Christmas Eve party until most of its themes have been unwrapped in two long dance scenes. First there’s an ensemble of Dream Fairies, anticipating the Snowflakes who end act one. They have to navigate around an outsize silver Christmas tree that immediately disappears after Clara (Amanda Bertone in the cast I saw), in her nightie and pointe shoes, discovers the package the Fairies have left for her. All this happens to Tchaikovsky’s party music, which accompanies another interpolated scene, with Drosselmeyer (played by Mateo), a group of performing dolls, and a toy theater that reminded me of Dr. Coppélius’s workshop.

These preliminaries, I guess, are meant to prepare the audience for what follows, but actually they undercut the events of the ballet. If Clara dreams the giant tree and the fairies before the party, then there’s no magic to the appearance of these fantasies when she dreams them later. If Drosselmeyer keeps a storehouse of entertaining dolls at home, why does he bring only two to the Silberhaus party? The excited flurries and expanding pleasures of Tchaikovsky’s music get flattened to mere serviceability.

The delayed party scene makes only sporadic attempts to create the atmosphere of a cozy gathering of adults and children, mostly when naughty children have to be reprimanded. There’s no drawing-room scenery except for a dinky little Christmas tree (soon to grow bigger in the transformation scene), and the guests don’t seem to have clear roles, so you can’t distinguish Clara’s parents and her brother from the other guests. The " party, " then, comprises formal dances, with Drosselmeyer as the center of attention, producing his surprises and presents with panache. There’s just enough mimed children’s play to establish that the nutcracker gets broken, repaired, and endowed with a doll’s life in Clara’s affections.

After the tree-growing episode and a confused encounter between the mice and the toy soldiers, the ballet relaxes into the traditional all-dance journey to the Snowflakes and the Kingdom of the Sweets. I thought this came off better and provided some opportunities for the more accomplished dancers: Elizabeth Scherban as the Snow Queen, Elisa Gerasin and Matt White in a trepak that looked more like a csárdás, Allysia Bullard and Eleana Santorineou-Dawicki as perky Chinese purveyors of Tea, and Meg Flaherty-Griffith as Dew Drop, incongruously dressed as a Russian princess among tutu-clad purple, yellow, and pink Flowers.

The Sugar Plum Fairy was Kimberly Carnevale, uncertainly partnered by Nathan Cottam. I’d rather not see any example of a high-classical showpiece up close. The mechanics of the tricky steps always overwhelm the poetry, and in this case, as Carnevale ripped into her pirouettes, I could also see her eyes flicker with apprehension as to whether she’d be safely brought to a stop by her partner.

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