RDT on 'Voyage' of self-discovery

"VOYAGE," REPERTORY DANCE THEATRE, additional performance tonight (355-2787).

For the past few seasons, the Repertory Dance Theatre has been rediscovering itself. The world-renowned modern-dance company members have reached deep inside to see who and what they are. With "Voyage," the final performance of the season, RDT reintroduces itself to us.

Reviving Zvi Gotheiner's "Duets to Brazilian-Indian Music," the dancers, through six duets, present the many layers of relationships.

The relationships between the dancers are abstract studies of how Gotheiner saw relationships in society, and the dancers' relationship with space.

The duets are beautiful. All are dynamic. Some are forceful. Some are joyful. And one work uses the wall as a second dancing platform.

The dancers — Chien-Ying Wang, Thayer Jonutz, Angela Banchero-Kelleher, Josh Larson, Nicholas Cendese, Chara Huckins, Lynne Listing and Alissa Shirtzinger — keep the energy alive through the fluidity of Gotheiner's choreography.

Stephen Koester's world premiere of "Fever Sleep (A Chaotic and Frenetic Event That May Go On for a Bit Too Long)" is at the once humorous and heart-wrenching. The idea of finding who we are through our minds and speculating what happens when we lose our minds is kind of a running idea through this work.

Adding to the piece is the minimalist score by David Lang, which is highlighted by sound effects. Explosions, gunfire and automobiles string the non-linear ideas of the work together.

But the dancers are able to stitch the surreal and sometimes nightmarish movements together in a linear way. Through this technique, snappy movements, such as stepping onstage and checking a watch or merely blowing a nose makes sense.

Scott Rink's 2004 "Here We Are" is more straightforward.

Jonutz and Wang dance as newlyweds, while Larson and Listing provide the score, which is actually just them reading a script that coincides with the dancing.

This humorous work draws laughter as the narrators carry out a conversation by a newlywed couple. The insecurities, the miscommunications and the walking-on-eggshells manner of speaking are highlighted by the strong and passionate movements, the lifts and twists that the dancers do all over the stage.

Molissa Fenley's visually stunning world premiere "Desert Sea" caps off the night.

Fenley's inspiration is taken from the Southwestern United States. The dancers become petroglyphs and pictographs. They even become the thread of an Indian-blanket weave.

The constant motion and extended leaps and lunges are ritualistically dynamic and show precision, finesse and stamina.

Thursday night's performance ran smoothly, and even with a small costume problem, the dancers continued and ended the work with — what else? — grace.

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E-mail: scott@desnews.com