The Dance Alloy program, "You've Got Male," could easily be seen as dance by numbers, what with Stephen Koester's "Four Short Dances With Little in Common" and Pilobolus' "Duet" performed by this youth-oriented company.

Pam Panchak, Post-Gazette Dance Alloy's Michael Walsh, left, and Kevin Guy rehearsing for "You've Got Male." Click photo for larger image.

But the group's first full-length performance at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater went far beyond the primary colors one might have expected from a group that has been dancing together for a little more than a year. Artistic director Beth Corning has pushed and prodded her dancers into a viable company, one with a firm semblance of a tangible theatrical style and a luxuriously weighted, yet sleek technique on which to base it.

She has done it with an astute eye for new choreography, as she seeks to rebuild the Alloy repertory for the future. Friday night's performance was nothing short of stunning, with a trio of works that would be the envy of any small modern dance company.

Koester's romp provided the beginning, the end and quite a bit in the middle, as it bookended "Duet" and David Shimotakahara's "Open Seating." Often seeming like a race to the finish, it brandished its physicality like a sword, cut up, as it was into four sections. Beginning with a quartet of dancers racing out of the gate, Koester's choreography raced over and under and tumbled in between with a whirlwind of motion that rivaled a Keystone Kops routine.

The following trio of dancers carried themselves like overblown aristocrats, hissing at each other in a similar puzzle of movement. Cass Ghiorse and Maribeth Maxa were the twins, two peas from the same pod that couldn't bear to be separated and Michael Walsh closed the program with a breathtaking solo that single-handedly unfolded a cascade of falls amid its rhythmic complexity.

If Koester's "Dances" were the soup and nuts (and more) of the program, Pilobolus' "Duet" was a slice of sheer poetry. Seemingly simple, such as the arm that spiraled up like a curl of smoke and the series of intimate lifts, this piece used minute control and weight distribution that alluded to a myriad group of relationships -- young, old, male, female -- something different for each observer. Ghiorse and Maxa, carrying their weight over impossibly long legs, were not the stereotypical Pilobolus dancers, who are often built like sturdy fireplugs. But they easily settled into the balances and counterbalances with a sweet understanding and smooth connection, as if the yin and yang of life.

"Open Seating" was something of an unknown quantity by this Cleveland choreographer, but Shimotakahara's piece turned out to be a mesmerizing tour de force for the company. Four red laquered chairs were placed in four pools of light inside a perfect square outlined with tape.

It became an arena for the action, where four people defined elements of society and never really wanted to test the tenuous boundary around them.

Moving from a game where only the fittest survived, it went into a series of duets, more like face-offs and confrontations. The dancers vogued, then waited in nervous anticipation as they performed this high-level game of musical chairs. Only at the end did Maxa gingerly test the perimeter. Resisting this obvious path, she ultimately chose freedom within her self-imposed prison.

The program will be repeated tonight at 7, when patrons pay what they can. For more information, call 412-363-4378.