Repetition, in both music and movement, is powerful in “Into the Hairy.” Each sound and step is fully explored before it develops into its next iteration. Patterns establish a sense of order within the world of the dance which proves to be all-consuming: soloists may break from the pack, undulating their torsos in more expanded movements but they are always, inevitably, swallowed back up. This happens most dramatically near the end of the piece, when one dancer, escaped from the pack, is ritualistically transformed, costume pulled down and torso left bare. When the dancer returns to the group, it is with a caress: a pair of arms fold around their back.

Throughout the piece, the dancers form a larger, pulsing organism, maneuvering themselves into big, complex poses. These sometimes involve acrobatic lifts, in which a few dancers, held aloft, cast their legs scorpion-like over their heads or out in a perfectly flat center split. Huddled into a mass, dancers fan their faces toward the audience like the opening of a flower—though with their ghoulish appearance, the effect is as chilling as it is beautiful. It is often hard to distinguish where an arm or leg may originate in these Rorschach-like formations.

The intensity of “Into the Hairy” derives from its measured and gradual evolution. The piece builds on itself while keeping the same pace at which it starts; what changes, however, is the dancers’ relations to one another and to the audience, at which they look deliberately and hauntingly. It is a descent into something hellish—the stage, at the end, cast in red light—yet impossibly arresting.