What Price Love?

"Raunch," Byrd says, "is a great vitality inducer." And, as the dancers swing into the lively, vigorous duets of "In a Different Light," no one's yawning or consulting watches.

There's something engaging about two women articulating the intricacies of Bach while sitting, crouching, and scootching about the floor. Fierce Attachment, performed by Meredith Mandel and Julie Martignetti, is the smartest of eight dances on a program by Erica Murkofsky's Imago Dance Theater. It's also engaging to watch Martignetti doggedly pull all the newspaper stuffing out of a male dummy she's been trying to to romance in All the Seams, and Carl Forsman explain his growing up as a dance-intrigued nondancer who finally gets to dance in Recital.

Murkofsky creates some surreal visions: Martignetti and Amanda Exley Lower dancing wanly with their own little-girl photos projected onto their white dresses (Where Did You Go?); Lower bare-backed, sitting amid an immense fluff of bridal net, moving her arms like wings (The Vow); women drawn to walk in a trough of dirt (Resting Place). These dances are intriguing, although none of them is fully developed—whereas a murky trio and a solo for Mandel seem to boil about in search of a direction.