"Danger is the salt of pleasure," explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton once said. So we could say that dance - sweaty, primal, and often dangerous - is the salt of the arts. In biology, saltation means "abrupt evolutionary change on a sudden large scale" or, you could say, a jump in the status quo. The Latin saltare means, among other things, "to dance."

Condiment, currency, preservative, stimulant, cleanser, salt is so important to life - and to dancer-choreographer Anne-Marie Mulgrew - that she woke up one morning not long ago knowing she had to make a dance about it. This weekend, Anne-Marie Mulgrew and Dancers Company will bring Salt in a leap and, literally, a heap - 100 pounds - to the stage of the Painted Bride.

"We're using 20 pounds of rock salt and table salt alternately in the different tubs," said Mulgrew, "and 80 pounds of table salt for the drift from the fly."

Mulgrew taught dance at Pennsylvania State University for 20 years and has directed Dance Celebration's education outreach program since 1997. For 25 years, she has been one of Philadelphia's most conceptual and prolific dance makers - skating across the marble floors of Philadelphia Cathedral with milk crates strapped to her feet, lolling for hours in a store window filled with 3,500 lemons, and waltzing around Old City with her Umbrella Ladies.

In Mouth, she danced in an elaborate, bustled hoopskirt made completely out of newspaper by artist Mitchell Taylor Gillette. Gillette also conceived Tales of the Buffoon, which WHYY commissioned and televised in 1990 with Mulgrew's choreography. He is one of many artists with whom she has collaborated, including musician Keith Calmes, installation artist Jonas de Santos, videographer-composer Peter Price, and videographers Vida Vida and Carmella Vassor-Johnson.

She's made so many site-specific dances that anyone walking around Philadelphia during the last two decades likely has seen at least one of them. Most memorable were Dances for Imaginary Places in Dilworth Plaza; Three Ladies in Waiting, with projections on the side of the Arden Theatre, and 2007's Hidden River Project on the then-newly opened Schuylkill Banks.

Mulgrew tried out Salt last year at Community Education Center as a half-hour work in progress, now doubled in length. An essential element for life, salt is necessary for cell formation and is used in rituals and as a healing agent, as Mulgrew knows from her research. She said the latter aspect of Mark Kurlansky's 2003 book, Salt: A World History, helped her get through some recent health issues and refocus on her choreography.

For her, making salt into dance meant looking to exotic or biblical places for inspiration. Visually, she found video clips of Himalayan salt fields and a salt tasting that will be projected. Musically, she found inspiration in works by Israeli-born cellist Matt Haimovitz, German-born sitar player Prem Joshua, British pianist Rick Wakeman, Indipop composer Biddu, avant-gardist Heiner Goebbels, and even workout tracks from Spa Goddess Dolphina.

"I actually got Dolphina for the workout class I teach at the Arts League," Mulgrew said after a recent rehearsal there. "It has a Middle Eastern tang, as does all the music for Salt."

"The idea of salt," she said, "became more of a vehicle for all it can represent: rituals and customs - social or religious - bitterness and beauty. Just as with the music, cross-cultural connections play a big part in the movement concepts."

At their first rehearsal at the Painted Bride on Monday, Mulgrew and her dancers jiggered with the boom box to get the right music tracks up for the work's 10 sections. A rectangle of salt rimmed the stage, and the eight dancers took turns in their sections.

Dancer Joseph Cicala - rehearsal director and a founding member of Mulgrew and Dancers in 1986 - and Elrey (Star Child) Belmonti tried out the third section, in which they move large tubs of salt to different spots on the stage. In "Cleanse," Mulgrew, arms above her head, sensuously poured salt over her body. In performance, salt will drift from overhead continuously.

Several dancers said the salt was painful. "Boy, it really hurts the soles of your feet," one of them noted, brushing hers clean.

"The dancers complain about the fine salt getting in your eyelashes and in between your toes and under your fingernails," Mulgrew said. "But it's just part of the environment of the piece."

Mulgrew's movement vocabulary is hard to pin down. Sections with the full cast have them posing in stylized angles.

"Well, I studied with Helmutt Gottschild at Temple," she said, "so you may see a little of the German expressionism I learned there. And I took classes at [Merce] Cunningham's studio for a couple of years. But I think I'm really doing a form of release/yoga technique now. I think of my choreography as experimental, and at times multimedia."

Mulgrew is happy to be back at the Painted Bride after an eight-year hiatus. "The Bride was really instrumental in my early career. We did Ten Dance Days - marathons of dance - and something called Co-Dance," she said. "Thankfully, Dance/USA Philadelphia's theater-subsidy program made it possible for us to return. It feels like a homecoming."