Bauer isn’t in the dance, but Hullihan is, along with Julie Alexander, Danielle Goldman and Kayvon Pourazar. While Gill, a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, hasn’t produced a tremendous amount of work yet, what she has shown (Marginal Strip and wounded giant at Danspace Project and the Kitchen, respectively) identified a choreographic voice both rigorous and astute. Her experiments with space and time are even a bit mind-altering. There’s a stillness that crystallizes negative space and deceptively simple movements that, in turn, pulsate voluminously; both are framed within Gill’s impeccable structure.

Eleanor & Eleanor, which includes sound by Jon Moniaci, lighting by Joe Levasseur and design by Jeff Larson, opens the shared program—Gill requested to go first because, as she puts it, “I feel like this work needs to start with a controlled space.” Part of the piece is about honoring movement (there is a trio that serves as a comment on the lack of actual dancing in current contemporary choreography); it also hones in on a specific performance quality Gill is after. “The dancers are trying to abstract themselves in the space—I’m not even sure if I understand, at times, what that means,” Gill says. “We don’t want to disengage from what we’re doing, but we also don’t want to overengage. We’re trying to really be present—I think that word is used a lot, but it’s a complicated place to be. The agenda is to allow the composition of the dance to come to the forefront; the individual drops back.”

Still, there are moments, especially in Hullihan’s case, when the dancer transforms into Gill’s idea of a fictional body before your eyes; the choreographer describes it as “a strange kind of separation between the brain and the body.” In one moment, when Hullihan stands downstage, her body slowly shrinking toward the floor, it is not the collapse you notice, but the haunting way in which blood seems to drain from her face, rendering her skin waxy. It’s a bit like gazing at a portrait long enough to feel as though you’ve entered it.

“We worked to take the energy out of her form, out of her figure, out of her body, though energy is not the right word exactly,” Gill explains. “When she starts that series, I perceive her as being almost hyperengaged inside of a performance, and I worked with her to become gradually disengaged. We talked about this literally in terms of the eyes. You know the way that the eye can become dull? Like it stops having a sparkle or a glisten? It’s really weird, but she can do it, and I’m amazed by it.”

Beth Gill presents Eleanor & Eleanor at Dance Theater Workshop Thu 29–Sat 1.