By Sima Belmar

WHEN SHIFT SENT out its press release for "Noise" (a night of performances), I took no more than passing notice of its mention of Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai's influence on Noise (the title dance piece on the program). I had never seen a film by Wong, but days before I attended "Noise" (March 14-16, ODC Theater), I learned that his films were choreographic in nature. I decided to see for myself what made that so, and I rented In the Mood for Love, not to arm myself with a measure of how the dance fared in comparison with the film but rather to discover what had struck such a chord with choreographer Manuelito Biag.

In the Mood for Love is a melodrama about Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan, two neighbors whose lives intersect on the road to intimacy lost and found. As much a kinesthetic experience as a visual or narrative one, the film operates as an essay in physical theater. To a riveting score by Michael Galasso and Shigeru Umebayashi, scenes dance across the screen, a moving architecture of muted colors, imprisoned emotions, split frames, and stretched and compressed time.

Noise was set to much of that film's score, which triggered scenic flashbacks in my mind's eye. Nevertheless, Noise stood on its own as a dance in which characters grappled with lost intimacy, and as an effort by Biag and his troupe to make something grand.

Humor bordering on camp governed much of the dance's tone. A man in his underwear played cards with a teddy bear. A woman in a bear suit smoked a cigarette through a long holder. A lounge singer in a ruffled tuxedo shirt sang about love and asked if anyone was having an anniversary that night. The textual elements in Noise weren't quite strong enough to carry the absurdist edges of the dance, but the movement and spatial design needed the most work. The dance was simply not physical enough. Noise felt more like a play with dance backup: nice partnering, well executed, but not enough attention paid to how the bodies in space could create, intensify, and explode emotional content. That sense of lack and disjunction may have been magnified by my memory of In the Mood for Love, but my experience of Biag's other contribution to "Noise," Quiet Nights, showed me that he does know how to fill a frame and make movement speak.

Quiet Nights was set to music by Arvo Pärt, and it threaded voice-overs recounting youthful experiences with stars through the lyrical dancing. Hugging duets of gentle slow rocking, slashing arms and staccato jumps, and moody stargazing were performed with a happy earnestness. Tiffani Snow's dimly lit stage scattered with bloated star shapes rested the piece in the hours before dawn. Soft and lovely, Quiet Nights may not have taken the risks Noise took, but it certainly acted with integrity and provoked interest. Biag's company called to mind descriptions of Mark Morris's early company – peopled with personalities, real bodies, genuine spirits – and this added to the dance's human quality.

Dances by guest artists from southern California filled in the space between Biag's two pieces. Naked featured Rebecca Bryant in a light gray sports bra and briefs, moving self-consciously through the space, stopping occasionally in a small spotlight on the floor. There was something risky in her choice of angles, her body looking caught in unforgiving – and thus intriguing – postures, but the undefined structure of the piece diluted the effect. Margaret Paek's Small Strategies gave us a treatise on the joys of cleaning the toilet. Paek was a strong performer, clean and athletic, with a consummate ease about her. In Randé Dorn's We Nestle Kissing and Screaming, three women in '50s-era dresses (that were open in the back to reveal ruffled underwear) and one undeveloped male character performed a sort of tandem homoerotic-heteroerotic dance to a dissonant array of songs. Clearly about love and its dysfunction, the dance combined thematic, auditory, and kinesthetic elements in a manner that both compelled and assaulted, though strong dancing by Beth Calarco, Vanessa Jue, and Dorn prevailed.