At the beginning of Mirra Bank’s new documentary, Pilobolus co-artistic director Jonathan Wolken neatly lays out the postmodern approach to the creative process. It’s a myth, he says, to think that the artist comes into the room with something to express. No. You come in with an open mind and an active body. Trouble is, as the film goes on to illustrate in painfully authentic terms, not everyone involved in a project may share that premise.

In 1998, Pilobolus, the 30-year-old collaborative troupe of dancer acrobats, got together with artist/storyteller extraordinaire Maurice Sendak to make a dance. The Plob’s affinity for the grotesque must have seemed a great match for Sendak’s "Wild Thing" sensibility, but when they all convene in the Pilobolus studio in Western Connecticut, philosophies clash and egos fall. The deceptively avuncular Sendak turns out to be haunted by a dark vision of the Holocaust. As the dancers improvise toward a narrative, archival footage from the concentration camps is edited in, as if to insist on reality’s brutal story. The six company dancers gamely transform themselves into characters as the directors argue æsthetics and morality.

Last Dance chronicles the lurching of the piece, which eventually is called A Selection, toward the stage, along with the evolving, never really comfortable relationships among all the participants as they struggle to complete the project. We never get to see more than "scenes" from the finished product, but it’s hard to imagine how the dance could be more absorbing than this pitiless glimpse into its history. (84 minutes)