Zephyr Dance performed at less than full strength on Thursday night at the Mulberry Street Theater, after last-minute recruits took over for several dancers injured in a car crash en route to New York from the troupe’s base in Chicago. Still, the thought-provoking strangeness of the program seemed to be a natural component of the work by this 15-year-old company of women.
The advertised themes of the pieces were pretty much indecipherable. What was fascinating was the plainness of the movement and performing, and the ways mysterious mind-sets came through. Four dancers in practice clothes (Andrea Cerniglia, Emily Stein and two of the replacement dancers, Stephanie Chikhaoui and Mary Claire Hogan) moved slowly but deliberately along geometric paths, with Michelle Kranicke at their slightly more emotional center, in an excerpt from Ms. Kranicke’s “Rhythm of Irreversible Direction.” Set to music by John Cale and Rhys Chatham, the movement was unstressed but created the sense of a mental zone empty of all but the aftermath of action.
In her fascinating “Migration,” Ms. Stein seemed to be trying to appropriate music, by Fauré and Dwight Lamb, that was far more ornate than her dreaming, hesitant motion. Ms. Kranicke’s “Chewing,” set to music by Charles Amirkhanian and Thomas Tallis, was a cheerfully bizarre work for dancers (Ms. Cerniglia, Ms. Kranicke, Ms. Stein and Kelly Hayes, another last-minute replacement) in street wear and a party dress that looked like a flaming poppy in Richard Norwood’s lighting.
Heaven knows what they were up to, with their fluttering fingers, their silent chatting and, stripped down to practice clothes, their contorted near-crawls. But you couldn’t look away. What happened onstage, throughout the evening, was too authentic-looking and authoritative.
Zephyr also includes Erica Farrell, Sara Fisher and Emma Draves.