Dance review: | tEEth's "Grub" has a cryptic bite

Dance Review |

A lot goes on in "Grub," which had its world premiere at Seattle's On the Boards on Thursday.

There's stomping and grunting, laughing and muttering, grimacing and thumbsucking, videography (including blue-screen trickery) and snapshot-taking (or the parody thereof), jitters and quivers, lip-licking and teeth-gnashing.

Not to mention twisted song-and-dance routines.

Much of the choreography is finely and brutally executed, with rugged partnering and tight choral movement energetically performed by six fearless dancers: Gina Frabotta, Elizabeth Grossberg, Lee Kyle, Melissa Murray, Celeste Olivares and Noel Plemmons. The combinations of beautiful sound, harsh noise, rhythmic flow and agitated gesture couldn't be more inventive.

But what it's all in aid of is a bit of a mystery.

"Grub" is the latest production of tEEth, an experimental-dance troupe based in Portland, that specializes in primordial imaginative antics with a high-tech bent. Co-artistic directors Angelle Hebert (choreography) and Phillip Kraft (music, video, tech direction) are intent on taking their audience into territory that can't be verbalized, a place that's discognitive to the max — but cannily orchestrated.

One highlight is a rigorously adversarial male-female duet. It's topped by a wildly comic quartet in which two men do everything they can to distort the sound of two singing women. (Lip-strumming and over-the-shoulder body flings are the least of it.)

There are live video surprises that shouldn't be given away. There's also a stretch of video dullness where emoted distress into the camera brings the show to a near halt.

Kraft's amplified electronic score sounds like a demented but appealingly tuneful music box at times — and like an all-out aural assault at others. The singing is vigorous, with Olivares proving especially powerful as lead vocalist.

"Grub" seems to be saying something about hunger and prey, private agony and feigned/forced family happiness. But the show, frankly, defies logical analysis.

What you're left with are abrupt and sometimes amusing vacillations of mood and movement, emerging from some cryptic realm of the psyche.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com