Wonders -- and dangers -- of science

A fascination with objects and the way they move dominates “The Science Project,” a 50-minute cavalcade of effects and ideas presented Wednesday by Rhode Island’s Everett Dance Theatre in the first of three performances at the Skirball Cultural Center.

Indeed, human movement looks decidedly loose, ragged and imprecise compared with the efficient, reliable actions of spheres, pulleys and pendulums set in motion by the four-member cast.

Watching a wrecking ball swing on a cable just far enough to knock over a platform and send an apple falling onto a bed of nails, you see a process at once whimsical and as doom-laden as ancient Greek tragedy.

Teacups descending on slide units and causing the slides to collapse also convey the inevitability of destruction. For just as every action has an equal and opposite reaction, Everett artistic director Dorothy Jungels keeps balancing the wonders of science with reminders of its dangers.

Those reminders most often come in the form of speeches describing the career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist widely considered the father of the atomic bomb but a humanist deeply alarmed by what he brought into being.

You can also find a sense of alarm at what people bring into being in sequences featuring large balls rolling on portable tracks held by the dancers. Initially a clever, intricate game -- the balls switching from track to track across the stage -- the action eventually grows oppressive, with the dancers’ bodies becoming the tracks and the pace accelerating into overdrive.

If this were an Elizabeth Streb piece, the dancers would become nearly indistinguishable from the objects in such moments: state-of-the-art movement machines able to slam into walls like crash-test dummies. If it were a Diavolo piece, they would be dwarfed by giant contraptions and trapped by them like caged hamsters running on a treadmill.

But the Everett dancers look more like Charlie Chaplin or Lucille Ball working at impossibly fast conveyor belts: cheerful and hopeful even as their tasks swallow them up and their fate seems to be something like falling through a collapsing slide onto a bed of nails.

Besides demonstrating scientific principles (dropping a rose and a book at the same time, for instance), they lope through choreography that gently lampoons show-dance cliches, only occasionally and perhaps inadvertently suggesting that they might be well-trained professional dancers rather than just footloose science nerds.

On Wednesday, Marvin Novogrodski and Bravell Smith remained nearly perfect in this regard, but a brief tango for Aaron and Rachael Jungels broke the illusion of amateurism with explicit, unashamed technical expertise.

“The Science Project” features original music by John Belcher, along with classical, folk and jazz recordings. But the uncredited use of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things” sets the seal on the event, helping us reconsider all the stuff that fills our world, all the uses we’ve found for that stuff -- and how some of the things we’ve invented have changed our lives more definitively than warm woolen mittens or brown paper packages tied up with strings.

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Everett Dance Theatre

Where: Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A.

When: 8 tonight

Price: $25

Contact: (310) 440-4500 or www.skirball.org