E-Mail This Article to a Friend Wing work Boston Conservatory Dance Theater BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Boston Conservatory Dance Theater’s concerts last weekend didn’t have their usual support from the conservatory’s fine student orchestra. Whether by choice or necessity, the absence of live music opened up some choreographic territory beyond what can be framed by a smallish ensemble of classical players. None of the recorded selections was well served by the theater’s low-fidelity sound system, though.

There’s usually a pointe ballet on these programs, and Luis Fuente’s new work was set to the second piano concerto of Dmitri Shostakovich, a big, rhythmically invigorating showpiece. An Exterminating Circumdance was a fairly standard display of leaping and fast traveling steps on pointe, except for one thing: the 11 women wore caps with little antennae on the top. So then, inescapably, their metallic face designs and glossy, hand-painted unitards added up to bugdom.

After the bug contingent had assembled, with their regal leader (Ebony Williams), three men appeared, dressed as ordinary street punks. The rest of the ballet concerned the punks’ attempts to capture or seduce the bugs. The bugs whirled away in alarm, only to return so the punks could rush them again. In the slow movement, the queen and one of the thugs (Marlon Taylor-Wiles) found each other appetizing for a while; then Williams turned an embrace into an attack and the pursuit was on again.

The bugs turned into angry Wilis in a series of threatening formations, but their quarry kept escaping. Finally, the thugs hit upon the idea of using weapons instead of pirouettes, but when they advanced with Flit guns, the bugs easily confiscated them and mowed the guys down.

I guess this wasn’t any dopier than half the animated movies out there these days, and it did provide a pretext for the women to bring off some tricky formations with assurance. According to a program note, the dance is about conservation of wildlife or something, but no tree hugger could possibly take this as a serious metaphor.

There was a time when dancers wanted to dignify their physicality with references to nobler themes. This was the basis for all of José Limón’s work, even when he wasn’t overtly choreographing stories. In 1966, he made The Winged, a plotless choral dance with an atmospheric soundscape by Hank Johnson — bird calls, drumming, bits of modern jazz, and silences. Limón drew on birdlike images from nature and mythology to build a long dance of groups flocking together and sweeping away, with more intimate glimpses of bird behavior. Emiko Tokunaga dressed all 17 dancers in exotic unitards, brown with turquoise and orange accents and tasteful glitter, and they all wore headpieces resembling the small turbans of Balinese and Javanese gamelan players.

Under Jennifer Scanlon’s direction, the duets and solos gave several dancers a chance to imprint their fluttering hands, staccato shifts of direction, and rapid traveling steps with ideas of courtship, battle, and of course, flight. In the larger groups, the dancers didn’t always achieve the collective breathing and suspensions that give Limón’s patterns their lift.

Amy Spencer & Richard Colton’s Severe Clear was more contemporary. Ten dancers in Emiko Tokunaga’s gray street clothes rush through a cluttered and chaotic stage environment, flinging and falling in spasms of desperation that kept reminding me of the lost youths depicted by Anna Sokolow in the 1950s and ’60s. Loud, chaotic music that might have started as folk song is played by the group Animal Collective.

Physical theater or dance drama has been around for a long time now. With enough intensity, dancers can create potent situations without resorting to the abstractions of technique or formal choreographic patterning. Add props and the possibilities are rich. Spencer and Colton seem to be developing a series of studies for moving with props or game structures, but their investigation looks to be in the early stages.

People walk blankly through the space with newspapers under their arms. The newspapers fall out onto the floor. Sometime later, people roll across the littered floor and the debris disappears with them. One by one, individuals form a line-up, after placing their shoes neatly in front of them. They stare at the audience and walk away. People follow other people with portable work lights. Various types of ropes and ladders hang in the space. The people ignore them. Later they drape themselves disinterestedly through the rungs. They take turns swinging back and forth. They clump together in mid air.

At the end, a man disappears in a flash of light as he climbs a rope ladder. Perhaps he’s looking for that severe, clear weather promised in the title.