While Spa is the newest, a couple of other recently opened dance spots offer variations on a similar theme.
Her opening dance — "Mayur Alarippu," evoking the peacock — abounded in arresting details of style: tiny shudders, little trills of the feet and richly volumetric use of arm gestures to open up the surrounding space.
An impressive demonstration of it at "Antony and Cleopatra" began with the African-style music for the opening dance number and continued through the booming drums that signaled scene changes.
The opening dance quartet of Neil Greenberg's new "(like a vase)," at Dance Theater Workshop on Tuesday night, has a low-key air, cultivated but quirky, mildly camp and somewhat arch.
The movie arrangers created a new overture, doubled the size of the opening dance prologue, moved scenes around and added musical overlays to the two-and-a-half-hour movie.
How were you originally recruited to play Shrek? A. I went to the premiere of "Saving Private Ryan," and at the party afterward Jeffrey Katzenberg's daughter and friends were doing the opening dance number from "Austin Powers" for me.
The Judson adherents were concerned with "authenticity," opening dance up to pedestrian movement and nontraditional venues, and authenticity would seem to have some relation to realness — although, for drag queens, realness involves plenty of artifice.
And the choreography throughout the show is first rate: characters spinning in and out of scenes, dramatic chases stuffed with action, that take place on the spot, and an opening dance number that's joyous on so many levels.
It isn't the opening dance number on a jammed Los Angeles freeway interchange, or the surreal extended homage to "The Band Wagon" and "Singin' in the Rain".
The opening dance number was actually the last scene to be shot, but the dress did feature in some earlier location shots in Sri Lanka, drying on a nearby tree.
