Dance - Connects the dots

At first appraisal, “Pattern(ing)” might seem misnamed. Dancers spin or leap or wave their arms or fold upon themselves — each doing something different to a different time, giving every appearance of randomness fit to make a Lotto official proud. Then you notice a phrase you’ve seen before — a sissonne deconstructed and given a Vaudevillian vibe, or a hand-jiving bending of a body — repeated in another context by another dancer. And then you see it again, soon to realize that this chaos of motion is assembled from only six distinct phrases, combined in various orders, and is in fact a rather rigidly ordered six-tone serialism in the music of motion.

Equal parts mathematics and chance, “Pattern(ing)” is the heart of Spelman dance instructor Wayne Smith’s (Passing) Phases, one of five works to be presented at Spelman’s Bodies Juxtaposed. A postmodern choreographer, Smith follows the lead of Merce Cunningham in introducing elements of chance into otherwise deeply structured work.

For “Pattern(ing),” Smith first created six distinct and unrelated phrases — some deconstructions of traditional dance vocabularies and some taken from pedestrian sources — and taught them in isolation to his student dancers, with no prior sense of how they would come to relate.

He then assigned each phrase a number and had dancers draw dominoes to determine which five phrases they would combine. (Chance allowed that some dancers would dance the same phrase multiple times in a sequence.) From there, more conventional dance techniques took over: how to transition from one move to the next, how to attack and inflect them, how to partner in duets and trios of dancers performing the same phrases in different combinations.

It would be a mistake to assign too much meaning — that postmodern hobgoblin — to the arrays that emerge, but the engaged mind may find a pleasing intuition of covert (dare we say?) design arising alive from the cold complexity.

The show will include dances by Jhon Stronks, one of Atlanta’s more avant-garde choreographers; Travis Gaitling, who builds modern work from African ritual dances; and the ferociously complex and acrobatic Ursula Paine. There will also be a screening of “Terpsichore,” a dance and film multimedia project.

Spelman Dance Theatre presents Bodies Juxtaposed, April 15-18 at Baldwin-Burroughs Theatre, in the Rockefeller Fine Arts Building, 350 Spelman Lane. Thurs.-Sat. 8 p.m.; Sun. 3 p.m. $3-$8. 404-270-5488. www.spelman.edu.