The Bride's stage was too small to hold this rib-thumping, heart-pumping, cry-mercy-Mama dance. A section with six female dancers was too crowded to look cleanly executed, although most of them danced full out. I hope to see it on a larger stage like the Perelman when it is finished.

The other half of the show was a work by Bessie Award-winner Kota Yamazaki called In-Ou, which he mounted on Anderson and three of his stellar dancers. This more intimate, partly Butoh-based piece worked well in the Bride's black box space.

The Bride gets bouquets for fostering this exchange between Anderson and Yamazaki in a four-week residency called "trxfr->transfer." The result: last weekend's two performances, and two this weekend with Yamazaki's group, Fluid hug-hug, which is based in New York. Anderson, a 2007 Pew Fellow who teaches at Muhlenberg College, and dance theatre X have been on Philadelphia's dance radar for a decade.

In-Ou is Japanese for "hidden shadows," but with four monolithic plywood rectangles creating dark spaces for the dancers to appear and disappear through, it seemed uncannily close to In-Out. Yamazaki says he chose the title "because I thought American audience would appreciate the wordplay."

The almost-40-minute piece opened with Anderson and Daquan Thompson, the latter of whom had wowed the audience earlier in his evidence of things (un)said duet with Willie C. Brown Jr. In that piece, Thompson and Brown wore white wide-legged trousers tugged up their torsos, and articulated their hands, midriffs and legs with a machine-gun rapidity that matched the percussive, claveslike music.

In Yamazaki's work, Thompson, now all in black, contrasted his earlier virtuosity with slow and controlled movements. Anderson, unlike the tall, thin Thompson, is barrel-chested, muscular and slope-shouldered, and in many ways even more fascinating to watch for his concentration and masterful placement of every part of his body.

Both men cup their hands, rubbing their fingers together. Thompson might have been making the universal gesture for money, but Anderson might have been worrying prayer beads.

Karama Butler and Dina-Verley Sabb-Mills held up the female part of the equation beautifully, skittering with the men like terns on a wet beach, breaking out into trancelike riffs, fist and heel dancing, and other Africanist-based movements.

Yamazaki, who designed his own very effective lighting, picked up these moves while working in Senegal with Germaine Acogny, director of the renowned Compagnie Jant-Bi. He grows this movement out of his native Butoh as if both came from a universal soil - and, since Africa is the mother of us all, they do.