Mizerany delivers the male issues

Fear of sex dominates many Michael Mizerany choreographies and many others find the body divided against itself -- inert arms and torso stretched on the floor, for instance, while energetic legs push against the dead weight and get it moving.

Both preoccupations were on view at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre on Friday when the locally based modern dance choreographer and company director presented a capably executed program of four short pieces, most of them familiar. Indeed, even Mizerany’s brand-new, half-hour “Man Clan” seemed familiar, for it reworked most of the same whimsical, neo-primitive options as “Troy Game,” a popular male divertissement created by Robert North nearly 30 years ago and long in the repertory of Dance Theatre of Harlem.

Like North’s showpiece, Mizerany’s eight-part “Foray Into the Male Pedigree” (his words) used a percussion-dominated score and focused on issues of competition.

Clever touches included the football-style offensive line that assembled to break up a male duet.

But only a solo for the powerful Jose Carcamo displayed a genuine edge, a sense that Mizerany just might take the piece into deeper areas of male pathology a la DV8 Physical Theatre. Instead, he kept matters light and diversionary -- especially the comic duet in which Stephanie Scott (the only woman in the 10-member cast) cheerily domesticated and balleticized Jeff Bulkley, until he rebelled at her attempts to force him into a fox trot.

However, after seeing conflicts about intimacy somberly explored by the same two dancers in Mizerany’s newly reworked “The Box” earlier on the program, the cartoon-style sex-war of “Man Clan” gained serious overtones.

Like the interrupted male duet, it conveyed a feeling that relationships are inherently troublesome and sometimes even hazardous -- a feeling that Mizerany has also expressed in the past few years in such neo-Expressionist dance dramas as “Edgewalkers” and “Necessary Depravity.”

But Mizerany solos on the Friday program also showed that solitude has its risks, whether the physical threats strongly embodied by Chris Stanley in “Tin Soldier” (1995) or the dangers of self-infatuation adroitly parodied by Bulkley in “Bump in the Road” (1996).

Nothing groundbreaking or indispensable here, but plenty to think about.