Dance, unlike theater, is a natural site for desire. Dance is about bodies in motion and texture and the rhythm of breath. If you don't consciously want the dancers you see before you (and if not, what's wrong with you?), you at least wish you possessed a body like theirs: fit, flexible, capable of leaving geometry like a visual residue in your wake. When you're watching dance, you can't forget yourself, because your own body is implicated in the art. Sometimes—perhaps too often—choreographers like to mess around with this inherent quality, making dances about the very desire they inevitably provoke. It's a short step from there to making dances about same-sex or even cross-preferential desire: Dance makes us all polymorphically perverse.

Molt, an evening-length dance by Paige Barnes, is about desire—and therefore, of course, identity. Only not so much in the first solo, ineffectually performed by Dorienne Gantar-Raynolds. If I were charitable, I would assume her section is a sort of prologue, illustrating a state of unsexed innocence. But her arms and hands are habitually unfocused, and her vague extensions are completely drowned out by the competing media: a loud, collaged-sound score (by Jeff Huston and Bob Barraza) and blinding images of desolate train yards and streets projected from behind onto two side panels. There is a nice moment when a supine dancer in the foreground, a silhouette behind the panels looking away, and a video projection of figure running to the distant background all come together in a single perspectival image. But it's just a moment—if the sound were softer and the video not as bright, Gantar-Raynolds wouldn't be completely swallowed by her surroundings.

Then comes the second section, in which Beth Graczyk and Paige Barnes push back against the sound and the video, hard. That visual residue I was talking about? Graczyk does isosceles triangles, and their sharp, stable ghosts press into the air with every phrase. Both dancers do a phenomenal job of turning movements in the score (disgruntled gears, sloshing sounds) into different analogies for the body as machine. The choreography is engaging, if unexceptional, until late in the dance, when a turn toward literalness (sing-song voiceover: "And I am your princess or maybe your prince. What on earth is there to define?") seems to push the movement onto a more playful plane. A glued-lip duet, performed as though it were being forced through the filter of some childish definition of French kissing, is more than a challenging gimmick. It closes the dance with a cross-eyed tenderness that belies simple notions of sex and desire.

annie@thestranger.com