Dance - Autonomic motions

She stands beneath the jeweled panes of the Georgia Avenue Church, her arms slightly arced, her body minutely bowed. Slow piano tones tick weary metronomes under a trembling mezzo aria crying shattered questions and blasphemies, aching in breathless silence. She moves through her motions like a rooftop wall walker, careless of her balance, forgetful of the fall.

Next, the same woman, the same piano and voice, the same space for contemplations of purity and vice. She follows familiar figures, but her limbs are all strong lines. Her steps are certain. She chasses crisply to the mezzo’s now full and playful notes.

Elizabeth McCune Dishman explores the similarities between grief and joy in the solo of her full-length dance piece “Reflex Meditations,” which premieres this weekend with Amanda Exley Lower’s “Hunger.” Dishman, the director of Coriolis Dance Project, and Lower, director of Duende Dance Theater, are collaborating (as they often do) to present Pulse, an evening of investigations into human impulses.

Both works look at paired drives, examining their oppositions, entanglements and sometimes surprising correlations.

In “Reflex Meditations,” Dishman investigates the energies and interactions of coupled reflexes — avoidance and longing, fight and flight, grief and joy, self-expression and conformity — first in their distilled expressions, later in a remarkably intelligent quintet that considers the whole organic twitching mass of colliding human reactions.

The Georgia Avenue Church is home to a soup kitchen and food co-op, and Lower’s “Hunger” uses the space to dance the lost distinctions between need and greed. Can we hunger for peace and justice as we hunger for possessions? In a work more political than we have previously seen from her, Lower examines how the impulse to devour turns hunger to gluttony, rest to sloth, grooming to vanity and love to lust. In an angry, pleading, searching dance, she calls out to those feeling a higher hunger.

Coriolis Dance Project and Duende Dance Theater perform Pulse Nov. 6-8 at 8 p.m., with a 2 p.m. children’s matinee Sat. Georgia Avenue Church, 645 Grant St. 404-377-2534. info@duendedance.org.