Lurid headlines about men who murdered their women when they became inconvenient inspired Breathless, a linear narrative Ruddy called a reimagined premiere of a previous work. The piece is based on the murders of Stefanie Rabinowitz (by her husband, Craig, in 1997), Laci Peterson (by her husband, Scott, in 2002), and Anne Marie Fahey (by her former boyfriend, Thomas Capano, in 1998).

Gabrielle Revlock, Janet Pilla, and Meredith Riley Stewart danced the roles of the three doomed women, charmed at first by their controlling future killers, danced by Rick Callender, Hershel Deondre Horner III, and Ian Dodge. A former Martha Graham principal dancer, Ruddy trains her company in that tradition, but mercifully, she freed her dance of the bathos that dates so much of that work for contemporary audiences.

Though the women are initially swept off their feet and carried away in a series of lifts and leaps, the abuse soon begins with falls, rough yanks and betrayals, with girlfriends represented by a pole dancer, Katharine Savage. Having judged national pole-dancing contests at a local gentleman's club, I can say that not one contestant challenged Savage's beguiling sensuality. Ruddy's duet for Savage and Horner was kinky and fearless.

Ellen Fishman-Johnson's slightly minimalist score expressed suspense, and Jorge Cousineau's video projections added spirituality.

Linke has spent a total of eight weeks since last fall grooming Ruddy's dancers in another early-20th-century style - Mary Wigman's German expressionism. Linke's Quasi Normal was an animated pictorial, derived from photographs of Wigman in dance positions and sketches of dance moves by Dore Hoyer, a devotee of Ausdruckstanz, as the discipline is called in German. Brigitta Herrmann, one of its most moving interpreters, has worked in Philadelphia for 40 years, since studying with Wigman and Linke in Berlin in the '60s. Linke gave her a breathtaking multiple role that could have been goddess, high priestess or Mother Earth.

After deliberately taut solos by Alexei Borovik and Christine Taylor, Sun-Mi Cho danced a startlingly erotic, swirling solo. Dodge handed Hoyer's sketches to the reclining women dancers, and after a moment's study, they got to their feet in duos and trios and danced them. Both genders wore wide, dark-colored palazzo pants skirted in front, by costumer Jeffrey Wirsing. Music by Polish minimalist Tomasz Sikorski and German composer Michael von Hintzenstern sustained the movement to its exquisitely mystical ending.