The pair arrive at an empty town, which, in her memories, is populated with early hosts being taught how to dance by technicians in lab coats.
"My Brazil is solid," said Celso de Nascimento, an electrical technician, who danced shirtless with his wife in the hot afternoon sun.
Although some young technicians might dance the entire ballet in an extroverted fashion, Ms. Stafford wisely brought touches of delicacy to her first pas de deux with Mr. Boal.
Even more impressive is the in-house Artist Resource and Media Laboratory, which will provide arts technicians and dance artists with extensive access to video-editing, digital video creation, graphics layout and digital performance playback.
Urban companies like Rhythm Technicians demonstrated that the dance had continued to evolve with more complex moves, and in 1995 GhettOriginal Productions put on "Jam on the Groove," a break-dance musical, at the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village.
Numbers dance across screens, graphs are drawn and technicians scratch their heads.
The men are more self-effacing, although — as the bullfighters' dance from "Don Quixote" showed — no lesser as technicians.
One of the motion capture technicians actually said that the dance was more "violent" than the fight scenes they are more accustomed to capturing.
Of the season's four heroines in "Serenade," she was the most marvelously egoless in manner, the cleanest, strongest technician and the most personal in dance inflections.
There is, however, far more criticism of Ms. Pagliero's nomination than of Mr. Hoffalt's, with numerous suggestions on dance Web sites that she is more of a technician than an artist.
