The last quartets are filled with startling gestures: a bow tapping ominous accompaniments against a music stand, or sustained notes exchanged between the four instruments ending in swooping, violent crescendos.
Ms. Spencer, Ms. Moore and Meghan Stoops closed the program with Jonathan Harvey's "Riot" (1993), a rugged, high-energy piece in which broad dynamics and startling gestures create the contours of an animated conversation, if not necessarily a riot.
There were hints of the gentle young princess that Odette once was, but Ms. Herrera made plain through her sometimes startling arm gestures and phrasing that Odette was now a wild creature.
He pummels the piano in different registers and then repeats the gesture with startling precision.
Every part of his body is moved in isolation, and the contemporary speed in his collage of gestures is startling.
Yet Nixon remains an emblem of political villainy, the instantly recognizable man with the heavy jowls, startling nose, and awkward gestures; his image is still visual shorthand for any compromised public figure.
Cleaning it first, he pulls a cobweb from the bones to "drape it over my head like a cap," a gesture simple and startling in its vividness.
In "Christ" (2006) the figure explodes not in the usual torrents of flesh and blood but into radiant shafts of yellow light and, in a gesture of unexpected, startling beauty, a cloud of tiny butterflies.
Odd little hopping runs, inscrutable gestures and one startling handstand were intriguing, but more fascinating were the inner disturbances that flashed out from beneath heavy false eyelashes.
Someone had put a catalogue for last year's MOMA show of Matisse cutouts on a coffee table, and that gesture of personality seemed startling and poignant amid so much genteel blahdom.
