DANCE / CHRIS PASLES : ‘House’ of Future Can Be Built on Common History : Choreographer Bebe Miller’s work-in-progress opens the Feet First Contemporary Dance Series.

Amid dozens of books propped open on the floor, a woman stands in thoughtful silence as a man comes up behind her, puts his arm around her forehead and slowly uses his weight to force her to the floor. It is a recurring action that jump-starts Bebe Miller’s “In Mnemosyne’s House, Again and Again,” a work-in-progress that opened the Feet First Contemporary Dance Series at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Monday.

Mnemosyne is the Greek goddess of memory. Memory is recorded in the mind and in books. So memory and history are here seen as weight, as oppression, as recurrence and--in the ensuing fleeting entrances of other dancers in the Miller company--as something fragmentary, inconclusive, occasionally conflicted and sometimes something to order, overlook or kick out of the way.

Emotional values are intrinsic in that opening image of Scott Smith bearing Lucy Guerin down “again and again,” as well as her later liberation from him--less so in the action-packed episodes with Phillip Adams, Nikki Castro, Renee Lemieux and Earnie Stevenson.

But Miller, who does not dance in the piece, adds another level in a piped-in voice-over by recounting a grade-school event in which she experienced, perhaps not for the first time, racial prejudice. She wonders why these “bits of hurt and pain” keep recurring in her mind, why she keeps picking at them. The only actual year she mentions is 1963, which could have been the year of the event.

She does not say it, but that was also the year President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Is that her memory too? The piece ends with one man left alone in a headstand, slowly falling over. Has everything turned upside down since then? Are memory constructs simply unstable?

“Mnemosyne’s House,” set to a compiled score by Christian Marclay and lightedby Stan Pressner, is only about half an hour of what is projected to be a full-evening work. What seems fragmentary and unclear today may coalesce into a larger, more coherent and purposeful pattern later, although perhaps not.

The choreographer said in a recent Times interview that we are made up of “flashes of memory that can come uncalled-for, have no order and are sometimes not complete. But somehow they are what make us up as whole human beings.”

Notice the plural. Miller seems to be aiming at something beyond just the personal (history “is the subject of the piece,” she narrates), and her individuals rarely escape the group that supports and finally entraps them.

Completing the program was Miller’s “The Hendrix Project,” a suite set to five recordings by Jimi Hendrix, which included Miller’s smashing solo (set to “Like a Rolling Stone”) chronicling the ravaging of personality described in Bob Dylan’s lyrics, and Smith and Stevenson’s final duet (“Little Wing”), which reminds us--agonizingly at this distance--of the joyous hopes and faith in harmonious relations among all peoples voiced in the ‘60s.