A bold ‘Move’ has mixed results

Showcasing artists as adept at speech as at motion, the Company of Strangers uses choreography to garnish theater pieces that are primarily defined by their texts and acting. Movement often expands or deepens their frames of reference, but if you changed the words, everything would change; change the dancing and who’d notice?

At Highways Performance Space on Thursday, this locally based ensemble fielded 14 performers in a seven-part entertainment titled “Move Your Meet: strange encounters in public spaces.” What Hollywood calls “meeting cute” dominated the intimate sections, quasi-obsessional theater-of-paranoia the larger-scale sequences.

Artistic director Hassan Christopher continually exploited the comic potential of pairing a meek male with an assertive female, framing the evening with two editions of “Bench,” a duet for him and Marissa Labog. In the first version, they supplied buoyant, physical embellishment of a mock-academic spoken tract on mating rituals. In the finale (“The Extended Remix”), they replayed the scene at greater length using movement alone.

The “Bathroom” episode also involved a recycled tale -- in this case a video speech edited and fragmented a la vintage Merce Cunningham-John Cage collaborations. Both wearing white dresses, Christopher and Monica Gillette ornamented this speech with brief, elliptical dances -- and performing in drag freed Christopher from the repressed or mild-mannered roles he’d played earlier, allowing him to dance with genuine power and authority.

Although each section took its title from a different location, “Move Your Meet” utterly lacked a sense of place and nearly all the sections ended up belaboring their premises with nowhere new to go. The final, surprising revelation of Jones Welsh’s bloodlust made “Airport” an exception, but “Train Station” delivered so many revelations, it proved the program’s minor miracle.

Created by Jennifer Li Aldridge, Rich Bianco and Jacques Heim, it started out as one more weak-boy, secure-girl playlet. But Aldridge and Jamie Hebert suddenly became tango-dancers and just as suddenly musicians riffing through “The Very Thought of You” and various Gershwin themes.

Their relationship kept ricocheting into so many shared avenues of expression that Aldridge and Herbert seemed totally made for each other -- and you waited for them to take up brain surgery, rocket science and Iraqi prison reform together.

No such luck. “Move Your Meet” quickly returned to the predictable working out of Christopher’s dramatic agendas. But no matter how familiar and rudimentary those pieces seemed, there was always an immensely likable, versatile artist such as Aimee Zannoni, Julia Leichman, Chris Stanley, or the others previously mentioned, to keep the result fresh and invigorating.

“Move Your Meet” may represent little more than Christopher’s preliminary foray into physical theater: contemporary in style but (except for “Bathroom”) curiously dated in content.

However, the Company of Strangers has all the skill, charm and appetite for creative adventure it will ever need.

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Company of Strangers

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

When: Today, 8:30 p.m.

Price: $16

Contact: (310) 315-1459