We went to see Verb at CPT on Saturday night. Usually Verb has something exciting and unbelievable in store; remember when they announced they were doing Appalachian Spring or the Anthony Tudor ballet? Surely, one thought, they couldn't do justice to that! But they did, and then announced another high profile work. They just keep topping themselves.

Saturday's program was a change. Instead of a Cleveland premiere of some high profile piece, the emphasis was more on the homegrown. Artistic Director Hernando Cortez offered a world premiere and company members Mark Tomasic and Robert Wesner each contributed a dance. For us this carries its own cachet. We've known Tomasic's dancing for a long time but have never before seen any of his choreography. We saw Wesner's own company, Neos, on this same stage in 2004 and found much to admire.

The program opened with Mozart Piano Trio in C Major, choreographed on the company by Sean Curran in 2004. Like a lot of Curran's work, this dance strikes a jarring, quirky note in its opening moments. Floppy feet, bouncy locomotor movements and happy face mugging are not what one expects to see with Mozart. After we get used to the movement pallet we are reminded that Curran's sometimes outrageous sense of humor, here held mostly in check, coexists with strong compositional values. Themes, quirky and otherwise, are repeated and combined with other themes to weave a rich tapestry. We don't care that this is not a premiere any more; we could watch this dance again.

Tomasic's dance, The Memory Room, is next. Pardon us for failing to mention the dancing in this piece; stage business to both comic and dramatic effect overwhelmed our powers of recollection. Tomasic had his dancers strike matches on a dark stage, pluck petals from a rose and smash plates. Colored paper petals rained from the flies. Not that all this stage business didn't somehow seem to mean something, to play into Tomasic's announced theme, and not that we didn't like it. Tomasic's wry and wicked sense of humor showed through. Also, Memory Room went with great confidence to a contemplative, even poetic, place that we'd like to see more.

Sleep Study by David Parsons evoked sustained hilarity from Saturday's audience. Old curmudgeons that we are, we were not amused by a bunch of dancers rolling around in their PJs (well, one of us reports being perhaps not quite so curmudgeonly). For one of us, a running gag does not a modern dance make. We have the same kind of problem with a lot of Parson's work. For us, The Envelope is redeemed only by the dancers' deft execution to Rossini's caffeinated score; the slow motion, sleepy dynamic of Sleep Study precludes such redemption.

Wesner's Child Ephemeral is set to "various lullabies" but it's no sleep study. In it Wesner steers clear of any narrative content and rolls out a continuous stream of elegant invention. We were particularly struck by a pair of duets danced by Tomasic and Anna Roberts and Glynn Owens and Erin Conway. Wesner's concert last winter fell afoul of the culture wars and he was savaged by a local critic; fortunately he's still choreographing and we're committed to seeing whatever we can of his work, like his politics or not.

Cortez' premiere, Unquiet Minds, concerns the characters of Commedia del Arte. Unfamiliar with the archetypal identities of the many individual characters of that period art form, we came away feeling certain that much of the dance went over our heads. Like today's funny papers, Commedia plays on the audience's familiarity with a cast of stock characters. That familiarity we lack, but we resolve to provide our readers with a primer of Commedia characters as part of a preview to the next performance of this dance. Even with only minimal insight into the characters (after all, we were both English majors, so Commedia del Arte isn't a total black hole of ignorance), we found this one of our favorites among Cortez' choreographies. The music, excerpts from various pieces by Francis Poulenc, and the Commedia costumes by Christine LaPerna worked with the balletic vocabulary (Cortez originally began developing Unquiet Minds on American Ballet Theatre II) to create a satisfying whole. We were mystified by criticism that some steps seemed awkward when the characters are, after all, puppets; that the stage was too small for the dance when much of the dancing was deliberately contained in a small circle of stools.

During one of several intermissions, Executive Director Margaret Carlson offered a preview of Verb's June third and fourth concert at Cleveland Museum of Natural History: three dances from the repertoire, a Cleveland premiere performed by G.D. Harris of the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company and, Carlson informed us, another guest artist who is China's and perhaps the world's greatest dancer. Never mind his name; we accosted Carlson and fixed her in our collective steely gaze. "Better than Barishnikov in his prime?" we asked. "Better," she said with a straight face. Ah, Verb. They'll probably deliver.

from Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas vicnelsa@earthlink.net (:divend:)