Two premieres are family affairs

In her later years, my grandmother often said, “It’s no fun growing old. I’m against it.”

The same sentiment prevailed in Meri Bender’s dance drama “Arc,” which premiered as the centerpiece of “Dance Cycles,” an evening-long exploration of life spans presented Thursday (and repeated through Saturday) at Highways Performance Space. The 20-minute trilogy was conceived and directed by Bender, who also performed, along with Don Bondi and Elizabeth Ince, movements the three devised together.

Lacking cohesion and occasionally ungainly, it unfortunately was no fun either.

In “Flashbacks,” Bondi looked regal in a robe before moving jauntily to the music of Glenn Miller, while Ince, as his wife, whined about how she was no longer the woman she once was. In “The Rememberer,” Bender, as Bondi’s mistress, perhaps, spouted excerpts from the book “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt” while an agile Bondi executed moves with a walker. As this work never moved beyond the obvious, the painful “Sequela” found an Alzheimer’s-ridden Ince tended to by Bondi.

The program’s other premiere was also a family affair: Tara Davison, 19, sang beautifully (music by her father, Peter Davison, words by e.e. cummings) as she accompanied her mother, Iris Pell-Davison, in Pell-Davison’s solo “Dancing the Did,” an unhappy hodgepodge of leaps, spins and wild-eyed looks.

Previously reviewed works completed the concert. “Connections,” choreographed and performed by Roberta Wolin-Manker and Robert Whidbee, was emotionally charged. A riveting Patrick Damon Rago, danced Joe Goode’s “Native Son.” And Deborah Hay’s “Exit,” an Edward Hopper painting come to life, had seven dancers moving in isolation to Barber’s elegiac “Adagio for Strings.”