One disjointed whirl of life before death

The world is reeling in “We Will Go Outside Where the Wild Wind Blows,” an uneven, 67-minute experimental theater piece by locally based dancer-choreographer Stefan Fabry that opened Thursday at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica.

After rolling an office chair on wheels and a large window-frame platform on casters in rapid swirls around the stage, Fabry, Debra Christie and Mitra Martin break off into circling and turning of their own, singly and together, sometimes swinging one another around but not really connecting.

And that’s the point -- the way people lose themselves in the whirl of their lives.

Riding the platform and staring through the window as if on a moving train or bus, they arrive at a spot that they explore as if it’s new to them.

Here, Martin’s everyday gestural moves contrast with stylized unison dancing (slow reaches, crouches and lunges) by Fabry and Christie.

Soon, Christie begins the most sustained dancing in the piece: a series of low-to-the-floor balances (repeated and modified later) that slowly, steadily unfold with meticulous control into stretches and extensions.

Besides performing sardonic spoken passages about death -- most of them functioning like outtakes from the Theater of the Absurd -- Martin gets an effective shattered-tango sequence: fragments of music and motion as clear and disjointed as randomly edited film clips.

Fabry can dance with formidable power, but he gives himself nothing more intense than varied holding-his-breath exercises ending in desperate gasps for air. At one point, he lifts and balances the chair, seeming to try to understand something mysterious about it -- but quickly gives up.

As one deliberately discontinuous episode follows another -- often accompanied by throbbing recorded sound textures suggesting rhythmic machine noise -- Fabry increasingly focuses on physicalizing his concept of lives hurtling through meaningless activities toward extinction.

Relationships lead nowhere and scarcely warm the piece. Fabry and Martin execute an inventive reimagining of ballroom dance, their arm positions changing rapidly as their steps go on and on. But intimacy is just another irrelevance or an empty stopgap, as in a passage showing the two women cuddling on the chair (with Fabry eventually joining them), projecting phony smiles.

All three stage a funeral procession in which Fabry and Christie carry the window unit as if it’s a coffin as Martin wheels the chair in front. And maybe the whole piece is a last rite.

Certainly, “We Will Go Outside” remains an artist’s bleak view of his own artistry and all other human actions as pathetic sideshows: hedges against the moment when there’s no more breath left to hold and all the speeches about death die along with the speaker.

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‘We Will Go Outside Where the Wild Wind Blows’

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

When: 8:30 tonight

Price: $18

Contact: (310) 315-1459