DANCE REVIEW : New Eisenberg Works at Highways

No more jokey pieces for girls with plastic pistols. No more social commentary on yuppie Angst . No more confessional narratives.

Mary Jane Eisenberg is in her pure mode, according to “Shale and Other Transformations,” the engrossing work she and four superb dancers delivered Wednesday at Highways.

And pure, for this increasingly introspective choreographer, tends to mean sober. It translates to lean, uncomplicated movement that is just a gesture away from a natural walk, say, or from the desolation conveyed by limp and dangling arms and an unpulled-up neck. Especially when Eisenberg herself does it.

Like the work she produced last year in a Hollywood church, this one uses a dance-in-the-rectangle format and allows the audience to surround a performance that takes place in four long lanes.

Its score, by trombonist Bruce Fowler, begins as a haunting elegy for chamber ensemble, and its dancers--Frank Adams, Amy Ellingson, Amy Ernst and Walter Kennedy--are sleek virtuosos in individually outfitted gray practice togs.

Eisenberg’s trademarks--the relay signals that spur one dancer, then another, into motion--facilitate the human contact that comes only with difficulty. In fact, if one looks at “Shale” (which was once the company name) as symbolic group therapy, all of its various parts make sense.

The most vivid among them is a slow, surreal procession to a dirge-like accompaniment. At a common signal, each figure freezes and the pose takes on a sculptural, seraphic look.

But over its hourlong duration--with solos and pairings and re-pairings and circle dances and cruciform lifts and gradually greater exertion and more pronounced balleticisms--what becomes clear is Eisenberg’s quest for connectedness. Trancelike isolation gives way to shy engagement and then to testy behavior.

The mood changes to playful, jaunty, sometimes even child-like. The choreography develops adult expressions--in rhapsodic duets with strikingly geometric fish-dives.

At the end, though, after everyone else has achieved this hard-won contact and is smiling fully into each others’ faces, Eisenberg still grapples with inhibition.

Is she most comfortable with her eyes cast down and no apparent affect? Is this dance work a therapeutic device?