By Sima Belmar

AT THE CLOSE of "Hauntings: Dances by Lea Wolf and Stephen Pelton Dance Theater" (May 16-18, ODC Theater), while the choreographers were taking their bows, my neighbor in the audience whispered, "That Stephen Pelton – he's a dancer's choreographer." Every now and then I hear that sort of remark at a dance performance, and if I were Pelton, I'd take it as a compliment. Indeed, Pelton's dances – three of which were presented last Thursday night – are full of delicious movement at once lyrical and spasmodic and rife with phrasing experimentation.

A Haunted House is the second dance-theater piece of Pelton's that mines his fascination with Virginia Woolf; it serves as a companion piece to his 1997 Death of a Moth. Featuring actor Jeri Lyn Cohen, dancers Sally Clawson and Nol Simonse, and musicians Eva Maria Zimmermann on piano and Charlton Lee on viola, A Haunted House is a powerful theatricalization of Woolf's eerie sensibility. Cohen vigorously articulated Woolf's text about a ghostly couple's visitation as Zimmermann and Lee performed Gavin Bryars's dramatic The North Shore. Clawson and Simonse morphed from gnarled trees in a dark forest into spectral lovers conscious of death between them. There Pelton took the fewest choreographic risks, but this seeming simplicity served to maintain the balance of the piece's elements.

It was with Rain (1992) that the dancers in the audience began to ache to understudy. Originally, Rain was danced by Pelton and Jesselito Cocjin Bie; Pelton cast two women for the 10-year-anniversary performance. Christy Funsch and Sue Roginski bit into this incredibly moving duet that takes its time building tension until it explodes with ferocity and clarity. Set to a score by Deep Listening Band that brings to mind images of slamming prison gates, Rain is a rowdy meditation on violence and trust. The coexistence of tenderness and brutality is a common theme in art, but Pelton avoided clichés by juxtaposing quiet accumulation phrases and fierce predator-prey partnering sequences. The diminutive Funsch and subtle Roginski were mesmerizing in and perfectly appropriate for a dance that had looked necessarily male when I saw it performed by Pelton and Bie in the late '90s.

Lea Wolf is also a dancer's choreographer, though she layers her lush movement with text, props, and philosophical standpoints. In Empty to Fill, Brooke Fries from SynthesisDanceNYC, Kristin Hollinsworth from Susan Marshall Company, and local dancer Angelina Vasile spilled a lot of orange lentils on the floor and into five clay cups. Dressed like slightly disheveled muses, the gorgeous trio of dancers swirled, swooped, and settled into Wolf's detail-oriented choreography: an ankle lovingly encircled by a hand, an arabesque fluidly extended then retracted with authority. Performed with a commitment to extremes, Empty to Fill explored dance as a phenomenon of time and space.

As a choreographer, Wolf possesses an endless supply of disparate dance ideas. In one piece she'll tackle formal concerns of space and rhythm, and in another she'll question the existence of God. Looking back on her still nascent career, one is hard-pressed to believe her repertory came from one mind. Thursday evening was no exception. The Story of Our Lives was everything Empty to Fill was not: theatrical, multigenerational, and narrative based.

Set to text (in English and Serbian) by Mark Strand, and music by Shostakovich, Scriabin, and Somei Satoh, The Story of Our Lives is an essay on family, memory, and habit. Showcasing Deborah Grebel and Stevan Grebel as the parents and Thaddeus Potvin and Vasile as the children, Story stepped over the maudlin monotony of Strand's text with quiet abandon. Movements repeated as the words and sentiments of the text repeated: "We are reading the story of our lives as though we were in it, as though we had written it. This comes up again and again." People were blindfolded, pages from the "book" were gathered and tossed. Because of the piece's Slavic tones, a Soviet context emerged, of cramped communal apartments, the loves and rages of extended families on display, the line between public and private erased.

The Story of Our Lives felt long, the repetition taxing, but what emerged in the dance's closing moments, just as the lights began to fade, was a deeply moving sense that we live lives of habit, that though we lack control over life's trajectory, we claim agency over the past in an effort to survive with imagined dignity.