For Siteworks, context is site-specific

Claiming as performance sites a number of spaces inside and outside the Skirball Cultural Center, four locally based dance companies kicked off the experimental Siteworks series on Sunday afternoon.

Nobody chose to dance inside the museum exhibit spaces as Liz Lerman did in the past, and too many of the pieces looked like conventional choreographies transferred to the Skirball.

However, in “Wall Stories,” Allyson Green and Ben Wright managed to find potent perceptual issues in a narrow outdoor corridor and the dry riverbed of stones behind it.

With the audience watching from a balcony directly above them, nine dancers used the corridor wall and floor for intriguing movement studies, sometimes dividing the area by unrolling patches of green carpet, sometimes linking up in web or starburst formations.

Trip Dance Theatre soloist Craig Ng provided an improvisational prologue to Monica Favand’s “Skin Would Shed” by moving through hillside hedgerows and around a huge sawed-off tree trunk. Then, after he led the audience to a balcony overlooking the main courtyard, six other Trip dancers took over, three of them posing in body masks on the opposite sides of the balcony, three dancing below.

The scale of the dancing proved too small to dominate the large open space but, like many of the segments on Sunday, the performance suggested intriguing new environmental contexts for dancing.

It did the same for dance comedy. As the audience stood behind her at the back of the Magnin Auditorium stage, Arianne MacBean projected her satiric “How to Make a Site-Specific Dance” at an empty house, illustrating her lecture in playful flurries of motion.

The more tough-minded Shel Wagner Rasch improvised three pieces (“Middle, Up, Down”) with her dance partner Stefan Fabry and cellist Tom Peters.

Their no-touching collaboration occurred in the lobby, their cycle of dressing/undressing and ascending/descending on a staircase in the Guerin Family Courtyard and their moody response to confinement inside a freight elevator below the museum.

Next Siteworks: Feb. 2, 2003.