The Portland-based company tEEth makes technically innovative and emotionally engrossing performances about love, self-loathing, and the other high peaks and low ditches of life. They’re aesthetically restless, sometimes using lavish design (mirrors, masks, and one set that looked like plaster walls that had been crumpled, soaked in ink, and molded into shapes by a giant) and sometimes relying on nothing more than the dancers’ bodies. The company once staged a duet on a small wooden platform—a woman danced on it (barefoot) while a man hacked it to pieces with a large ax. tEEth is the real deal. (On the Boards, 100 W Roy St, www.ontheboards.org, 8 pm, $20)
Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua.... More by Brendan Kiley