Bathed in Amanda K. Ringger’s wrestling-ring bright lighting, Jennifer Nugent’s mouth grotesquely draws down to the left as if in a stroke, drooling. She wears an oversized green raincoat by costumer, Karen Boyer, which later snapped apart revealing a breast. Wrapped in a brown puffy coat, Mykel Marai Nairne stared blankly off into space. The nightmarish facial expressions on each dancer recalled scenes from Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death, with its torture instruments, and depictions of the Black Plague.

For what seems an eternity, no one bats an eye, until barely perceptible smiles creep in, eye contact and slight turns begin to surface, yet all the while the group has not broken physical contact.

When they separate, they begin to remove clothing, backpacks, boots, from one another. These acts of perceived self-preservation turn to desire to desperation to anarchy. Cory Seals lies serenely amid this mayhem peeling and eating an orange, tossing the peels to the floor. I look at the orange and think of the pineapple in Twyla Tharp’s 1981 “Catherine Wheel.” She says its spokes are like the spokes in the Catherine Wheel. So are those in an orange cut between ends.

Stage hands arrived, taking opposite corners of the foam square and turning it, circling the square with increasing speed. The dancers’ balance on the soft surface became ever riskier. Intermittently, they spray us with a scented liquid. By now the dancers have also removed objects from pockets and backpacks: a brick, rope, vape, tangled earbuds (is there any other kind), mirror, eye make-up. Nugent emerges from the pileup of bodies with a medieval chainmail hood. Amy Genux (who doubles as artistic and administrative assistant to Driscoll) shreds what looks like parsley, exploding it all over the scene so it falls like glitter in a snow globe.