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The movements and scenarios comprising "Home Made" are so detailed, vulnerable and absent of privacy it's curious that any choreographer would make them public for audience consumption.
The same could be said for the modern dance work's accompanying music, which makes pianos and voices sound as gentle as falling rain or bird song, or as strident as breaking ice or glass.
The intimacy of the work is less shocking when you learn that the movement and music were created simultaneously by choreographer Angelle Hebert, 34, and composer Phillip Kraft, 35.
As the wife-and-husband team behind the Portland, Ore.,-based dance company tEEth, they know something about the intimacy they're seeking to represent in their collaborative work, which has been praised in their hometown alternative newsweekly, Willamette Week, as "perhaps the single most powerful performance piece to have come out of Portland." Hebert and Kraft, along with dancers Noel Plemmons and Keely McIntyre, bring their work to Rose Wagner for three performances in Salt Lake City, Oct. 20-22.
The 55-minute piece opens with moments of silent discovery, as man and woman touch beneath a tent-like canopy. The dance progresses — much like a real-life relationship — from initial elation to the hard work of building a partnership. Along the way, every step and gesture reveal the struggle of compromise and negotiation, the solace of reconciliation, and the beauty of moments when love shows its true face.
The two dancers emerge out of the canopy into movements symbolic of risk, as they put hands in each other's mouths, and grow into robotic movements of relationship routine.
In a bracing segment, seemingly symbolic of the courage it takes to risk heart and soul to another person, the couple sweat and struggle to take off their clothes before "Home Made" reaches another plateau in its attempts to express the mystery of relationships through dance and music. There are playful moments, too, acknowledging that a relationship is dead once and for all when both parties have lost the ability to laugh at themselves, and each other.
It might all seem hopelessly pretentious, were it not anchored in experience. "Most of these explorations were going on in the studio when we were going through difficult times in our own lives," said Hebert, taking a phone interview with her husband off the side of the road in Little Dell Reservoir. "Trying to balance the project of being artistic collaborators and life partners is tricky."
It's tricky for dancers as well. Hebert and Kraft said they were fortunate enough to find capable dancers that were also good friends for this work of exposure. Plemmons said that while he was up to the sizable task of rendering "Home Made" into physical movements, the acting required was an even bigger challenge.
"Beside the nudity, it requires a greater level of intimacy between dancers than I've ever known," Plemmons said. "If we're not completely connected, it just doesn't work. Being accurate with your dance moves alone doesn't do it. You really have to be present emotionally to make it work."
The test of a successful performance comes when he hears sniffles between the notes of Kraft's lush, plaintive music, Plemmons said. "We once had someone come back for a second performance to show us a poem they'd written in response to the first night they saw it," Plemmons said.
In perhaps the surest sign that "Home Made" translates well the travails of love between two people, it can always be improved upon. It's complete in one sense, but never quite finished.
"We spent a lot of time running through improvisations in the studio before piecing it together," Hebert said. "You know it feels right after watching it for an hour, but then you can refine it almost forever."
'Home Made,' a dance work with tEEth
When • Oct. 20-22, 8 p.m.
Where • Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center's Black Box Theater, 138 S. Broadway, Salt Lake City
Info • $12-$15. Call 801-355-ARTS or visit http://www.tEEthperformance.com for more information.
Note • This touring dance performance includes full nudity and is for adult audiences only.