Maybe it was my front row seat in the black box space of San Francisco’s ODC Theater on opening night of a sold-out run. The air was thick with anticipation. I could see every drop of sweat and the eye contact of dancer to dancer. In creating new work for this show, the choreographers had been invited to include the element of chance, a generative task that was popularized by the surrealists and put to good use for making dance by Merce Cunningham and certain members of Judson Dance Theater. The evening of premieres by Natasha Adorlee, Trey McIntyre, Hélène Simoneau, and Seiwert herself, seemed to follow two different approaches: one that revealed its underpinnings and one that held its foundational cards closer to the vest.

For her own personal entry, “How It Feels,” Seiwert says she and the dancers “constructed physical games that primarily impacted timing and musicality to add indeterminate aspects to this creation process.” The dancers made choices as they responded to musical cues that were shuffled during performance. The terms of the games were largely invisible to the audience, yet the “intense active listening” required for working in this way had a visible impact. The dancers pulsed with a charge as bright as their neon green costumes. Seiwert’s masterful grouping and ungrouping of dancers created pleasing patterns in space; her women, on pointe, gorgeously arched their backs in sensual lifts and waved willowy arms as if strands of sea flora underwater. The mix of precision and fluidity, including the powerful presence of Grace-Anne Powers of BalletMet, was striking.