E-Mail This Article to a Friend Scrolling ‘Dance Straight Up(!)’ at Zero Arrow Theatre BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

CRASHarts has sponsored three rounds of "Dance Straight Up" (hold the exclamation point), commissioning new work from local choreographers, and last weekend’s show, at Zero Arrow Theatre in Harvard Square, skimmed through a range of dancemaking styles with one intriguing work, two capable but predictable works, and a community-dance effort. The new-for-dance Zero Arrow, a black-box space roughly resembling the Kitchen in downtown New York, has the potential for wilder adventures.

Three years ago, World Music started CRASHarts in an effort to patch the rift in the Boston dance scene that opened up when Dance Umbrella ceased operations. As a producer/importer of medium-sized contemporary-dance companies, Dance Umbrella gave us a glimpse of what people outside the Hub are thinking. CRASHarts has brought in a pretty limited sample of contemporary work so far — this year, only the companies of Ronald K. Brown and Robert Battle in March and the singular tap genius Savion Glover in May.

The fact that so little is on display here from the cutting edge in New York, or anywhere else, has to affect local dance production. It’s naive to think dancers aren’t looking at what their peers do. Curator Gus Solomons Jr., who wasn’t acknowledged in the program as curator and mentor, either by the sponsors or by the choreographers, made no bones about how hard it was to find good material this year. The program bios indicated a large amount of inbreeding and only one company, Sara Sweet Rabidoux’s hoi polloi, that has accumulated significant experience outside Boston. No surprise that hers was the only detour from the tried-and-true.

Nicola Hawkins and Kate Digby both made formalistic dances for four women, with movement derived partly from everyday actions like walking and rolling. Digby’s Here/Waiting used motifs of running and leaning off-balance without falling while standing on one leg. There was a recurring little chain dance with stamping accents. In unison or simple canonic succession, the women did careful falls forward and pull-ups. One idea of the dance, I guess, was to let the audience see the differences among performers teaming up to do the same things.

Hawkins’s Dharma was an idea wrapped in cloth: batikked panels in creamy white with pastel swirls along the edges. The fabrics, by Mary Edna Fraser, were ceremoniously unfolded by the dancers during the six sections of the dance to create different settings. The dance’s rather limited and low-key movement range — walking, pivot turns, semaphore arm gestures were the building blocks — served sometimes to create tableaux, as when two women faced each other and gestured like a four-armed statue of Shiva, and sometimes to implement little friendly games.

There was a duet that looked like a well-known improvisation exercise used to generate new material — one partner pushes the other into a new position and the partner reciprocates. But this sequence, like the whole dance, had been learned and rehearsed so that it looked planned for effect rather than spontaneous.

Two folk groups collaborated for New Land, the Turkish-Balkan Mavi Dance Company and the Brookline Academy Performance Company, which specializes in jazz tap. Their presentation, a quasi-dance-team routine with ethnic foot stamping and glitzy costumes, seemed to have Riverdance in its dreams.

Into the middle of all this, Sara Sweet Rabidoux tossed a truly weird and provocative essay on a domestic disconnect. In Day of the 24 Cakes, there’s a housewife (Kendra Portier) and her three dithery friends (Kristin Tovson, Kim Cadden, and Marisa Gruneberg), all dressed in frumpy dresses and hair, and a husband (Joe Shepard) wearing a sleeveless sweater the color of brick. The man hoards the women’s shoes. Sheets of paper are distributed around while you hear the sound of a typewriter, very loud.

These appurtenances don’t have any evident cause and effect, and neither do the circumstances of the couple’s relationship, or the wife’s relationship to her friends, for that matter. The man and woman dance together — almost. Their timing is off. They fight one move at a time, with the studied ambition of chess players. When the friends dance, they seem to be forever preparing, hesitating, holding back, and playing down whatever follow-through they can manage to achieve.

People can’t find their footing; they slide to the ground. They have trouble getting up. The man slowly tears up a sheet of paper. The three friends crouch on the floor, trying to reassemble the pieces. The wife looks bewildered.

The dance was as absurd as it was desolate. It takes great energy to project such bottled-up and clueless characters. A program note I didn’t read till afterward refers to the journals of Sylvia Plath.