Staibdance mixes with Vega String Quartet

• Jacques Polanco

It was clear from the work on display at Thursday night’s opening of Staibdance at Emory that choreographer George Staib and his company are unafraid to take on a vast range of tones and styles. Over the course of the evening, the work varied in tone from the comic to the subdued, from the narrative to the more abstract: styles of movement likewise ranged from elaborate to minimalist, jerkily birdlike to graceful, aggressive to gentle, from tightly patterned to chaotic, often within the same piece or even seen simultaneously from different dancers. The troupe fleetly and fiercely took it all on.

Staib often works with dancers in a cumulative and collaborative process, rather than arriving in the studio with a fully developed vision of his own to which he tries to make dancers conform. He’s unfailingly alert to each of his dancer’s gifts, limitations, and idiosyncracies, and he lets little bits of strangeness, humor, and individuality poke through. On those lines, dancer Nicholas Surbey was a standout in “Green in the Eyes” in which tinkly Chopin piano etudes suggested the innocence, humor, slapstick, and social displacement of the silent film comedies of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Surbey seemed so much in his element, it was as if he’d been born for the piece.

Despite the strong sense of wit and playfulness evident in much of the work, an overarching sense of sadness pervaded; “Pillow for Ghosts” was particularly somber and haunting. Choreographer Staib and dancer Kathleen Wessel moved along a long bench accompanied by pianist William Ransom’s melancholic playing of Rachmaninov’s “Vocalise,” perhaps suggesting a long-standing couple’s attempts to connect — or to remember how to connect — to each other, and meeting with various levels of success and failure.