In the central scene Chi Long and Alexandre Carlos face each other, costumed in white (all costume designs by Elen Ewing.) Clearly, a marriage ceremony, it’s also clear that Chi Long is no eager bride. Her wedding gown spreads out, enveloping her in a huge silk stage-sprawling parachute and she’s lifted perpendicular by another dancer beneath. I’m thinking Mother Ginger. Indeed, it seems a grotesque play on Balanchine’s “Nutcracker” with its dancer on stilts who pulls up her enormous hoop skirt to expose little stuffed doll-like children. Sound and wind billow the skirt tentlike as Chi Long agonizingly disgorges naked dancer after naked dancer in a headfirst birthing/breeding frenzy. This fable stood on its own, but it also seemed to add a grotesque nuance of being a parody of a parody.

To add to the Grand-Guignol mise en scene, another dark fable has Sophie Breton struggling free of multiple tethers, defying her would be captors.

While Philippe Brault composed the sometimes sinister soundtrack and sound environment overall, Laurier Rajotte performed his often surging, often eddying post-minimalist Femme-Monument live on a baby grand upstage right. He became more a part of the dancers when, after a brief pause, he reappeared in a sequined jacket for the final fable dressed like them. A joyful and colorful dance gives the audience some hope for a less dystopian world. Or, does it mean we are in denial?

If you stayed to the end, you may have felt uplifted as the opening darkness bloomed into a bit of a Broadway show with my favorite part a bit of lighting legerdemain that reminded me of David Parsons’ “Hand Dance.”

Sometimes, it’s all in the lighting, one of my companions who produced performances at the Zellerbach back in the day, pointed out. Labrecque “used the old-fashioned lighting here, not the modern digitized tools.” How would I have known that’s how the ten sets of hands looked so disembodied, yet warm and lifelike, sending out yet more coded messages.