Halloween night in the South End. Congress Street is deserted as usual. A cop is taking a nap in his cruiser, with the motor on just in case. Upstairs at Mobius there’s a party hoping to get started. Cider and treats have been set out, and people with staff tags mill around to greet the guests. A woman in an orange wig opens a door and inches across the gallery on roller skates. She has a beginner’s alarming, overconfident grin on her face. Since she’s afraid to lift either foot off the floor, she progresses by squatting or stooping over and jerking herself forward. Her legs start going in opposite directions. You avert your eyes, the way you do just before a car crash. Eventually she arrives at the reception desk and announces, through a bullhorn, that the theater is open.

Monkeyhouse was hosting its second week of performances, sharing the program with former Bostonian Sarah Carlson, who’s now based in New York. Carlson, Elmer Moore Jr., and Claire Byrne showed Carlson’s recent short duets and solos. In Forbidden Feast, Carlson and Moore began as mismatched partners, she wielding dish towel and modern-ballet technique, he punctuating some break-acrobatic moves with a pizza box — empty, one hoped. To the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, she flitted around the room tossing table napkins behind her, and he followed, bewildered but smiling.

Eventually they accommodated to each other’s styles enough to dance an embryonic pas de deux. Monkeyhouse’s part of the program worked out to four excerpts from their collection of old and new " oddities, " Anablep. The audience was invited to select from a menu of titles, and though this sounded risky and democratic, I think most of the choices came from the in-house people.

The beyond-bizarre costumes and props flaunted in Friday night’s pieces more than satisfied the expectations raised by the sprawling roller skater (Amelia O’Dowd). Most of the titles weren’t in my dictionary; the bullhorn offered crackpot definitions.

Odalisque — we know what that means — spoofed the voyeuristic iconography of the sexy female. Karen Krolak and Nicole Harris lounged and simpered in scanty costumes, undeterred by the disembodied orange work gloves clamped to their bras or the six-foot platform stilt each of them had affixed to one leg. In Stam ( " Something you do just because you can " ), Krolak writhed and undulated as if in a fever dream while clutching a white sheet around her body.

These and the other Monkeyhouse amusements had a feminist point to make, pushing conventions beyond extremes to demolition. The group also adhere to the abbreviated, non-threatening, one-punch format that contemporary performers use for an audience whose attention span is shrinking. The sketch format goes back to vaudeville and the slapstick comedians of ancient theater history. American tap dancers have always worked this vein, and Friday night Josh Hilberman and the Dance Inn ensemble put together another entertaining show at Arlington’s Regent Theatre.

Hilberman is a master tapper who sometimes dances as if he were two different animals. Jamming with pianist Paul Arslanian, bassist George Kaye, and drummer Bob Weiner, he seemed to be riding his feet, cantering, bucking, sidestepping, hitching forward, tipping sideways or back. The idea was not to decorate but to mount every step and take it for all it was worth.

Hilberman MC’d the show and did a very funny vaudeville skit with Bob Thomas. As a professor with a half-baked German accent, he set out to demonstrate 2001 steps, exactly. Thomas was a maniacal assistant who kept knocking over the easel with the flip charts. As Hilberman rapped out parts of the equation — 194 taps in two tempos, 194 taps as fast as humanly possible — Thomas scrawled the results and added up the taps, nervously submitting to Hilberman’s abuse.

Visiting artists Kurt Albert and Klaus Bleis studied with the American dancer Carnell Lyons in Germany, and they borrowed Lyons’s specialty, dancing while spinning a serving tray atop one finger. Other numbers in the show included the teenage Dance Inn students and a jazz solo choreographed by Billy Siegenfeld for Dance Inn director Thelma Goldberg. In an extended appearance, tap diva Brenda Bufalino first danced a slow but plotless story, then later tapped the sound effects to her own poems and songs. Bufalino seems to be getting more at ease, deeper and warmer as she gets older. At this performance she laid down a phrase for a sampler, played that tape as back-up for a new riff, taped that, and so on. Eventually she’d orchestrated her original phrase into a multi-part counterpoint jazz tap chanting rhapsody.