A robust corner of the Boston dance scene was on view last weekend in the first of a planned annual series called " Dance Straight Up! " , a competition sponsored by the CRASHarts division of World Music. Each of the four choreographers picked from a field of 37 applicants received a $3000 commissioning fee for a world premiere and all producing costs. A second gift was lighting designer Joseph Levendusky, who represents a considerable artistic favor. The rules limited the choreographers to a 20-minute time slot apiece that could be filled with one or more dances, including the premiere.

The general impression a stranger to the local dance community would likely get is one of overall competence, some terrific performing, but not a lot of new ideas. The content of the world premieres ranged from abstract contemporary movement to a funky kind of storytelling; this writer’s vote for the prize entry, Marcus Schulkind’s Let Bygones Be (set to the second movement of Dvorák’s Piano Quintet), was a revival of last spring’s solo dedicated to the memory of his father. Schulkind combined classical ballet vocabulary with mime gestures that have signified grief for many centuries — one hand to the heart, the head thrown back in mourning — but with understated placement that was enhanced by Lorraine Chapman’s authoritative performance. Chapman clarified each move she made, the direction of a hand or turn of the head, as if she were imprinting every part of herself in the space. The effect was almost overwhelming in linking us to the feelings of the choreographer.

Schulkind fared less memorably with his world premiere, which was set to music by Antonio Vivaldi. Three dancers performed " cute, " assigning each note a hand or foot movement or a fanny wiggle, according to cues from the music. In the context of his previous output, this piece is an afterthought.

The evening opened with a mysterious quartet of women dressed in white slips and picking their way slow motion in Brenda Divelbliss’s 1998 Crossing the Stream (set to music by the British experimental ambient unit O Yuki Conjugate). The work looked like early stagings by choreographer Paula Josa-Jones during her most intensely feminist period. It probably doesn’t matter that we didn’t know the women’s identity and where they were going since the images were so evocative.

Divelbliss also referred to nature in her premiere, the duet The Grass Underfoot Was Wet (set to music by the theremin group the Lothars mixed with glass-musician Angus Maclaurin’s " Fugue " ). Dressed in black tunics edged with fringe over brown pants, the two women performed mostly in unison, except when they were trading weight in heavy-looking lifts that suggested a contact-improv origin for the work.

The Carol Somers premiere, Northwind (set to Stuart Jones’s " Into an ultimate realm " ), was distinguished by the intensity of the performances, especially those of Somers and Michael Bolger. This abstract work began with solos for the five individual dancers, then continued as if each of them were on stage alone, even as they inhabited the same space. The pace grew frantic until the end, when the performers crashed to the floor on the final chord.

Beach Blanket Butoh, the program finale by Sara Sweet Rabidoux, is a spoofy merger of beach movies with the contemporary Japanese theatrical dance form. Rabidoux’s conceit was to pair the antics of Gidget and Frankie and Annette with the monk-like butoh performance style and set it to music that ranged from Elvis Presley’s Hawaii movies to the warbling of Yma Sumac to period songs by Annette Funicello. Silly? Yes, but the butoh allusions were skillfully integrated into the retro moves. And it didn’t hurt that dancer Joe Shepard, the lone man in the cast, had his head shaven and his face bleached white, butoh-like, in contrast to his red Hawaiian shirt and denim beach shorts.