Steamroller lives up to name

When Jesselito Bie, artistic director of San Francisco-based Steamroller, enters naked to a voice-over spewing his vital statistics, flaunting a Mylar-covered Hula Hoop, you suspect you’re in for, well, a visceral experience. Neither he nor his company disappointed the audience: Bie’s 45-minute work, “Young Gods (Revisited),” proved the main event at Highways Performance Space on Thursday.

Paired with (and presented by) Cid Pearlman’s locally based Nesting Dolls, the program, billed as “Nesting Dolls vs. Steamroller,” was no contest. Steamroller, in its Los Angeles debut, left the Dolls in the dust. Bie’s work, a witty and fearlessly athletic treatise on beauty, took its musical cues from such disparate sources as Smashing Pumpkins and the Crystal Method, while Bie’s taped narration was also a hoot.

Beginning with a quasi-catfight at a ballet barre, the work featured vignettes in which posing, preening and gymnastic gambits ruled. Arnel Alcordo, Jennifer Chien, Lena Gatchalian, Ami Student, Yayoi Kambara and Bie spoofed “Swan Lake,” disco dancing and working out, in a style Bie rightfully dubs guerrilla dance.

Alas, Pearlman’s premiere, “High Fall” -- in seven parts featuring Ann Kaneko’s video projections (apples, dancers, pampas grass) -- was hampered by bad rock music, lack of meaningful through line and an over-dependence on props.

A dozen able dancers, working with limited movement vocabulary, did little besides twirl, thud to the ground and roll on the floor.

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‘Nesting Dolls vs. Steamroller’

Where: Highways Performance Space, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica

When: Tonight and Sunday, 8:30 p.m.

Price: $15

Contact: (310) 315-1459