From stage left, a single dancer emerges on a high and descending platform.
An impersonator was only used for the introduction of the song; a masked dancer emerges from the costume tent at the side of the stage, and goes back in hiding while Jackson himself, also masked at first, swings down from a rope on the other side of the stage before taking off his mask.
And every dancer emerges as a fully defined entity in Ms. Marshall's sparkling, meticulously madcap choreography, which ranges from a River-dancing lineup of Irish policemen to a sultry ballet of jazz club denizens.
In the back corner, the grandfather clock is a literal and metaphorical door into the past: Yoon exits the stage, and Vong Pak, a traditional Korean drummer and dancer emerges in her wake.
After an elegiac instrumental introduction, a male and a female dancer emerged onto the tiny stage.
This aesthetic, the creators explain, acts as a blank slate, an erasing mechanism through which the personality of each dancer emerges.
Fifteen minutes into the performance, the fire dancer emerges.
At one point, a Native dancer emerged from the crowd and spontaneously joined them on the stage, wearing regalia made of flowing, multi-color yarns; he apparently belonged to a Two Spirit dance society representing gay and gender-variant individuals.
As the aboriginal musician David Hudson, who had displayed great skill on the dijeridoo, an Australian woodwind drone instrument, did a primitive jitterbug with Ms. Johnson, a Native American dancer emerged in full feather to join in.
Mr. Luna, a former Alvin Ailey dancer, emerged in two pieces that made it plain that he had something of his own to say and the skill to say it.
