Snappy Dance Theater performs its ideas in tiny, tasty chunks, like the tooth-size candy bars they sell at the movies. There were 11 numbers and four or five " interludes " on the two-hour program at Suffolk University's C. Walsh Theatre last weekend. (The program will be repeated at Friends of the Performing Arts in Concord June 8 through 10.) The pieces all had distinct identities, but similar movements kept recurring and nothing was very deeply developed.

With Martha Mason as artistic director and Igor Tkachenko supplying most of the musical accompaniments, everything is created collaboratively among the performers, musicians, and designers. This is a great asset and possibly a limitation. Group improvisation and physical theater are the generating skills for Snappy's repertory, and the eight dancers work smoothly and affably together, managing tricky props without self-consciousness. But each piece seemed to start from the same place, with a product firmly in sight. The ensemble moved to produce precalibrated visual or theatrical effects; they never seemed to test their collective tool kit for anything outside specified safety limits.

At least six of the numbers worked with the idea of how teamed bodies can assemble and disassemble into suggestive shapes. In Odd Egg Out, Mason, Jim Banta, and Sean Kilbridge first appeared as a heap of unidentifiable bulges. Hands, faces, feet poked out, gradually becoming attached to individual bodies. One move at a time, the woman tried to insert herself between the glued-together men; finally she succeeded in mounting the two of them and riding off on their back. In Split Ends, Bonnie Duncan and Cathy Bosch, with their long hair braided together, tumbled into postures of compulsory accommodation and aversion.

These and the other bonded group numbers depended on the mechanics of one body supporting or adhering to another body. In the evolution of these slowed-down gymnastics, the implications of human attraction, dependency, and trust emerged. I remember Mason floating on the upended feet of Bosch, who was lying on her back, in Mirabile Dictu. The designs created by these softly rolling moves seemed more important than the movers' physicality. The visual image may be bizarre or surprising, but the performers often look constricted making it.

When the subject is human behavior itself, Snappy turns to the conventions of mime and silent-movie comedy. In Resurrection, instead of an abstract design, a series of bifurcated characters was created by two fused bodies, as one person sat on another's hips, facing the audience. We could see that all the players had legs belonging to their hidden other half. A man in a handlebar moustache made advances to a simpering girl. He picked imaginary flowers and offered them to her. She tasted them, then started to devour them. When the courtship started getting hot, these characters suddenly somersaulted and new ones materialized.

In Movement in D'flat, the newest work, James Tanabe was an Everyman taunted by people who popped in and out of a set of moving screens. At first the spooks were elusive fantasy women. Later the whole cast (Bosch, Duncan, Banta, Tiffani Frost, Bess Whitesel, and Tanabe) seemed to get involved in a mystery without a plot. Bodies fell out of the walls, people chased other people. Suspects disappeared behind a moving screen and turned into someone else. Finally Tanabe pulled himself away from it all and left. The screens, now collected into a big box, headed after him.

Glassblowing was the inspiration for Glory Hole! In a darkened space, the dancers manipulated a series of illuminated props that suggested in turn the amorphous bubble of molten glass as it's being shaped and the red-hot liquid glass as it comes out of the furnace. Sometimes the dancers themselves imitated a 2000-degree furnace, or imitated swirling spheres and solidifying rods that could explode accidentally.

A lot of this concert, especially Glory Hole!, seemed set in a much earlier phase of modern dance, when audiences were not supposed to know how to figure out anything and dancers thought you had to dance about something that could be spelled out on the stage. In the 1950s Merce Cunningham decided dancing should just be about dancing. Around the same time, Alwin Nikolais was experimenting with another alternative at the Henry Street Playhouse in New York. Nikolais worked with props, objects, lighting designs, and dancers as the skilled operatives who put a visual concept into motion. Whether he's acknowledged or not, I think Nikolais is Snappy Dance Theater's spiritual father.

Issue Date: June 7-14, 2001