In “Nothing: more,” Autumn Knight and her collaborators and co-choreographers Kayla Farrish, Dominica Greene, and Jasmine Hearn let their imaginations roam in an interactive set that evokes an empty, after-hours gallery. With object design by Matt Shalzi, sawhorses, ladders, a Gatorade jug, a disco ball, and canvas stretchers create fodder for the busy scores of the performers. The trio attaches and detaches themselves from tasks of building and deconstructing barriers, winding and unfurling cords and rolls of paper and plastic, while also kicking soccer balls, harmonizing their voices, and changing their costumes. They proceed to follow unknown rules for a game that might be titled: Make the Most Noise You Can with These Everyday Objects That Are Completely Foreign to You. The effect is chaotic but somehow a delicate balance is struck, with Knight as chief obstructor, cutting in on the simultaneous actions with humorous questions and directions that seem to change the layers of their trajectories; Farrish and Greene err on the side of zany and extroverted while Hearn is more introspective. 

Near the end they arrange themselves behind a frame, itself set within a frame, for a group portrait. (For much of the piece, a photographer also roams the stage at the direction of Knight.) They preen or make funny facial expressions but for this one moment they gather in a legible composition. When the spell breaks, a performer climbs through it and eventually the frame is broken too. But as the trio tears up the stage in the last five minutes—pulling, running, dumping various gathered piles of objects from a cart—their destructive urgency brings each performer into their own unique and ephemeral power.

The family portrait that emerges in “Paradise Container,” is decidedly bleak. Conceived and written by McKevitt and Mirabile, this dance theater work follows a family of five living in a warehouse owned by their employers, a multi-national corporation. That this company is also a front for a new intravenous narcotic called “Shift,” to which most of them are addicted, only adds to the strong visual design from Charlie Robinson that work and home life no longer have any kind of clear boundary. Crocheted blankets obscure mounds of paperwork; meetings take place in kitchens; siblings argue among the boxes they are paid to store; and what appears to be their somnambulant father sits ominously still in a recliner while the rest of the family poses for selfies to post to their work Instagram and schemes about how to blackmail their boss who has impregnated one of the sisters. 

As an audience we roam with them as their sorry tale and addictive, and co-dependent tendencies unfold across the expansive space. The feel is nightmarish, as their banter bounces back and forth, with resolution as far away as it is in Samuel Becket’s play “Waiting for Godot.” The surreal and heightened drama, and the lack of clarity around who is playing who, is maximized with Mirabile’s strategic, trance-like choreography that comes near the end. Slow motion lifts tumble members of the family from high to low against a backdrop of a television spewing news, some of which eventually alerts them to the racket they are involved in through their employment. A long accusatory sequence of gestures repeats until the son decides to take initiative and burn it all down.