Motion Sensors

Nature Theater of Oklahoma, the daringly drab off-off-Broadway company that recently transmogrified dozens of hours of idle cell-phone chatter into the well-received "No Dice," has taken the idea of alchemizing the workaday in a rapturous new direction with its transporting 65-minute dance-theater experiment "Poetics: A Ballet Brut."

After the audience is herded deep through the bowels of the Public Theater and onto a small bank of risers, with nothing but a yard or so of space separating the front row from a red curtain, four youngish people carrying messenger bags and dressed in hipster T-shirts (Anne Gridley, Fletcher Liegerot, Zachary Oberzan, and the hypnotic Robert M. Johanson) stride into the narrow space and regard one another warily. As an early-'80s ballad plays in the background, the foursome engage in the jittery, self-consciously casual positions of men and women not particularly accustomed to or comfortable with being stared at. Arms move up behind the head and then jerk into pants pockets. Feet slide in front of one another. Eyes dart to the bystander close by, then ostentatiously far away. Then the music segues from Muzak to the Bee Gees, and these same banal steps take on a rhythmic urgency. Ms. Gridley, the only woman in the group, grows agitated as she repeats a dozen or so hand signals, each vaguely conveying an action or circumstance (cradling an infant, smoking a cigarette, pushing someone away). She performs these cryptic motions again and again, all the while stomping out a step-ball-change sequence with her feet, until one of the men supplies her with a chair.

It is at this point that the curtain opens and the audience is plunged into a disorienting but enormously satisfying manipulation of one of the Public's standard proscenium theaters. To divulge any more about "Poetics" would be unsporting. But it can be said that while these four unlikely dancers get very little respite — stagehands provide each of them at one point with a change of shirt and a Gatorade — they will find their insistent, enigmatic movements vindicated in front of a disoriented and delighted audience.

For all its willfully awkward components, "Poetics" has been choreographed by Nature Theater co-creators Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska with a rigid and often beautiful sense of structure. (The choreography reportedly stemmed from a series of highly deterministic tosses of the dice, à la Merce Cunningham.) The individual components of their dance are aggressively, almost defiantly commonplace: When the foursome lie down and tuck into themselves, rolling and reconfiguring with dogged precision, it almost looks like a kindergarten-centered version of regression therapy. But their gestural language is somehow all the more impressive for appearing so attainable; by the end, it's conceivable that Ms. Gridley's insistent moving glyphs would make sense with just a few more repetitions.

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Edward Gorey's 1963 poem "Gashlycrumb Tinies" chronicled the short lives of 26 somber tykes, one for each letter of the alphabet, who each met his or her demise in terse dactylic couplets. ("E is for Ernest who choked on a peach. F is for Fanny sucked dry by a leech.") Had these youngsters evaded their fate and gone on to dabble in computer animation, they may have resembled the sallow trio of women in "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea."

Preciosity and inspiration run neck and neck in the "10 strange stories and terrible tales" that make up this playful bit of cabaret/story theater, which arrives in New York after an acclaimed run at last summer's Edinburgh Fringe. Suzanne Andrade's script derives much of its spooky wit from the interaction between the live-action performers (herself and Esme Appleton, with old-timey musical contributions by Lillian Henley) and a series of stylized, faux-primitive video animations that unspool behind them. Much has been made of the way Paul Bill Barritt's visuals complement the onstage action — animated smoke rings "emanating" from a live cigarette and that sort of thing — but his strongest material can be found in a series of stand-alone animations. No good deed goes unpunished as two Victorian ladies repeatedly come to the rescue of a devil in disguise, and Mr. Barritt's dollhouse-from-hell tableaux are truly disquieting in a tale about a nefarious lodger.

Good girls meet with dastardly ends in remote forests "bathed in bruise-blue light," while mutinous gingerbread men gorge themselves on ginger wine and port until "their soggy biscuit livers fail." But while Ms. Andrade devises several comparably shivery images, few of them are strung together with any sort of narrative pulse. And despite the great deal of attention that has been paid to synchronizing the visuals, the sound system is surprisingly shoddy, with Ms. Andrade often resorting to a handheld microphone that shatters the painstakingly assembled mood and muddies much of her text. The unknown is a crucial part of any horror tale; the unintelligible is pushing things a bit far.

"Poetics" until January 20 (425 Lafayette St., between Astor Place and East 4th Street, 212-967-7555);

"Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" until January 27 (150 First Ave. at East 9th Street, 212-352-3101).