Each section of a dance is conceived as an inning or period of a particular sport like baseball, basketball, football, hockey, badminton, tennis, surfing, boxing and Frisbee.
For the new piece, which has its premiere on Thursday and runs through Jan . 20at Danspace Project in the East Village, six dancers (including Mr. Gordon's wife, Valda Setterfield), offhandedly discuss intimate details of their lives as they ostensibly rehearse a section of a dance.
The first section of "Shira," a dance of rebirth, was subtitled "In Memoriam" in tribute to the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center.
The program also includes the world premiere of a section of a new dance.
Mr. Fagan has also responded to the events of Sept. 11 by reworking a meditative section of a 1998 dance into a piece titled "In Memoriam: The Innocent, the Brave, the Hands, the Minds, All Mankind," dedicated to the victims and survivors of the attacks.
In addition to excerpts from his own "Wolf-Skins," inspired by Welsh folklore, the showcase includes sections of a new dance by the postmodernist Douglas Dunn and an experimental work by Jordan Isadore that combines traces of Trisha Brown's "Spanish Dance" with moves lifted from Beyoncé and the Harlem Shake.
Four of his female colleagues, in long flowing skirts, diaphanous scarves attached to their wrists, assemble in the center of the room to begin a section of a gentle harvest dance, led by the teacher Chang Soo Kim and accompanied by musicians playing drums, a large gong and a zither.
But the second half of the work, in which Young exits the room for an open stage, is dominated by a section of pure dance whose imagery seems to stage the cathartic process of Young's recuperation.
Later, at a ball in honor of the Prince of Wales at the Academy of Music, he commandingly took charge when a section of the dance floor collapsed.
Penny Jacobus's lighting creates a dramatically changing backdrop, with a horizontal ribbon of light that widens or narrows and changes hue before each new section of the dance — like a series of windows opening onto different skies.
Even in a relatively placid section of the dance such as this, glimpses of unease crept in — here, when the dancers, in between group formations, retreated to the edges of the stage to stand on chalk bricks, as though they were safe zones in a game of exclusion.
