'Science per Forms' pits dancers against machinery

In their song "Human," the Killers ask: "Are we human, or are we dancer?" The singer intones, "My sign is vital, my hands are cold."

On Thursday night at Christ Church Neighborhood House, Meredith Rainey and Marcel Williams Foster put that question to the test in Carbon Dance Theatre's Science per Forms. It's a wonderful title for a piece that explores humanity's contest between body and machine, and the question of which drives which.

The 45-minute work had multiple collaborators: Nine science, technology, architecture, and design wonks from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania associated with IK Studio and the Hactory (yes, a haven for hackers), and six dancers under Foster and Rainey's guidance.

The academics created the machina sans deus, a table-shaped creature suspended so its four "legs" (manipulated by computer commands) could bend its "knees" inward with spiderlike efficiency.

Anna Noble was the interlocutor between the technology and the dancers, and the unrelenting master of both. She wore accelerometers on her wrists, airplaning her arms so that each wrist commanded a different-colored cube projected on the back screen. They stretched, dissolved, and sprang back, much as a body might, or like dancer Annie Wilson, who opened the work lying on the floor, contorting herself in twists and twitches that presaged the movement.

Snippets of Gabriel Prokofiev's electronic and percussive music shifted between sounds like the airy raspberries babies make and the harsher, bilious blurbs adults make, or spun into metallic, cistern-like echoes.

Inside the dangling legs, the dancers undulated as if hit by shock waves while the lower legs folded up into them. In threat or embrace? Five of the dancers, including Eiren Shuman-Sutton, Felicia Cruz, Daniella Currica, and Sun-Mi Cho (artistic associate of Carbon Dance) writhed in tight formation as if trying to integrate themselves into one another, but collapsed from the tension.

Much of the choreography was ballet-based, suited to the machine theme. Four dancers left the stage to join the audience, greeting us in street clothes to watch Cho's angst-filled solo. It left her limp on the floor, with Noble in charge. Are Cho's signs vital? Are Noble's hands cold?

In an earlier, silent moment, we heard dogs barking outside at cars rumbling on the cobblestones - the old and the animal, the new and the human.