Andrea Miller/Sidra Bell, Dance Theater Workshop, New York

Strikingly committed: Andrea Miller’s ‘For Glenn Gould’

“Downtown dance” – as the experimental scene was christened long before high rents exiled choreographers to the outer boroughs – has always had a theoretical bent. But about seven years ago, the generation coming up decided to question the parameters of dance by not moving at all. Whatever motion survived the purge simply worked in the service of the choreographer’s ideas about dance and performance. The movement had little life of its own, little power to shape its ideas.

Carla Peterson, Dance Theater Workshop’s artistic director since 2006, must have sensed how askew the situation was, because she began commissioning choreographers – such as Andrea Miller, 28, and Sidra Bell, 31, on this double bill (until Saturday) – who believe movement and ideas feed each other.

Late in his life, Glenn Gould returned to the music that had jumpstarted his career, the Goldberg Variations. “It was a spooky experience,” he said of listening back. “I recognised the fingerprints but not the spirit.” With the charming and engrossing For Glenn Gould, Miller demonstrates the conversion of spirit into fingerprints – artistic intent into alienable object.

In her third premiere on a prestigious New York stage in six months, six strikingly committed and individual dancers craft whimsical sculptures from orange traffic cones, metal chairs, Christmas lights and teaspoons. They concoct compelling solos from the choreographer’s capacious, gawky steps, which drift into a modern-dance dream of ballet or transmute into spasms that take over the torso. Finally – and the transitions between scenes are abrupt – the dancers merge steps and stuff, balancing precariously atop their collection of random items as subject to object, or Gould to the recordings of his younger self.

Bell’s Pool also explores alienation – or drowns in it, anyway. Her seven dancers sport the kind of vampire club look – black latex, extreme make-up – that means to intimidate or at least prove risqué. The choreography is heavy on finely wrought, vaguely obscene gestures. Plus there is the dance music’s unremitting thump thump. And yet the dancers move with zombie softness: outrageousness remains trapped inside them.

The notion of numbness overwhelming spiky will is intriguing. Bell only needs to conceive the two separately enough that their embroilment stirs us.

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