E-Mail This Article to a Friend Notions Brian Crabtree at the Dance Complex BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Crabtree Dance brought six small duets and quartets to the Dance Complex last weekend in "What I Came For," its first concert in two years. Brian Crabtree and Jody Weber danced a recent duet of hers, and the rest of the program featured Crabtree’s work. His new quartets were more developed than earlier pieces, but all the work seemed inconclusive; all intimated dancing or desires that were being held in check.

Crabtree and his four female partners, Jody Weber, Audra Carabetta, Yenkuei Chuang, and Joelle Garfi, make up a physically and temperamentally diverse ensemble. Weber is an "all-there" dancer, completely invested in the movement out to her fingertips. Carabetta, a big woman who’s sturdy where Weber is plush, projects a sense of dignity and assurance. Chuang is straight and spiky, Garfi small and sprightly. Crabtree gravely molds each gesture when dancing, as if he’d discovered a marble statue and wanted to memorize it.

Something about Crabtree’s way of making a dance allows you to see the dancers as distinct personae. His basic strategy is to arrange the choreography as if it were for soloists. The two or four dancers all seem to respond to a different aspect of whatever music is playing, so they harmonize visually even when they’re moving independently. But each dance involves a process of overlaps and echoes — unison and canon — that knits the dancers together and separates them in unforeseen combinations, something like the way a classical string quartet works.

Although all the pieces share a movement vocabulary as well as a choreographic approach, they can range in kind from formal patterns to dramatic episodes. In Surround and Back, to the rocking rhythms of a gamelan and flute serenade by Lou Harrison, three women and Crabtree sweep across the space with big stretches and strides, wheeling descents to the floor, and scooping spiraling turns. They fall into two-part, three-part, and four-part counterpoint. They double up for a few phrases, split apart, align with someone else. With these constantly shifting tides over its less-than-six-minute duration, the piece becomes mesmerizing.

Crabtree’s new pieces, Lazy Susan and Cursive (the latter a work in progress), unfold in the same basic way, but there are more intense contrasts in the music. For Lazy Susan, Nicole Pierce played a Schubert piano work (one of the three from D.946) that started out as a stroll in the park and flung itself into agitato darkness. Weber had a taut, twisted solo that absorbed Schubert’s intensity, but the whole dance never really surrendered to the composer’s underlying sense of danger.

Cursive was set to Bach piano transcriptions by Ferruccio Busoni that shed a slightly acid, late-romantic glow over the composer’s certainties. The dance hinted at the grandeur of the music but didn’t succumb to it.

In an excerpt from Dark, with pulsing music by the Icelandic pop group Sigur Rós, Carabetta and Crabtree were a couple at odds with each other but bonded in the same movement vocabulary. They’d mesh together for a few moves, lying side by side or gesturing in tandem; then one would break off and they’d work in clashing patterns, or one would shrink away as the other approached. The situation seemed at an impasse when she left him, made a few moves as if she were about to begin a solo, and then fell to the floor. He was bending beside her as the lights went out.

Chuang and Garfi turned the idea of unison into a flirtation, in a section of Green that was set to Puccini’s "O mio babbino caro." Side by side or mirroring each other, they used green apples as tokens in a demure game. A climactic embrace was the first break in their symmetry.

I thought Jody Weber’s duet, A Steadfast Season (to music from Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s recording of Bach’s Cantata No. 82, Ich habe genug), ventured into some places where Crabtree’s Bach piece hesitated. Weber’s movement vocabulary is similar to Crabtree’s — stretchy and beautifully phrased — and she too explored the idea of harmony and discord, merging and diverging individuals. Their comings-together were sometimes sudden, though, and called for trust, as one partner supported the other. Weber had a solo passage that Crabtree later seemed to repeat in his own way.

The music ended up in the air, on an unresolved cadence, as if just about to go on to another part, and as the lights went out, Weber had somehow flown at Crabtree and he’d caught her horizontally in his arms. They looked quite calm.