At first glance, it seems that art will be imitating life when Chunky Move concludes the Australian Festival with "I Want to Dance Better at Parties."

Artistic director and choreographer Gideon Obarzanek became interested in dance while making the social scene at clubs in high school, so his mother suggested the real thing. He sampled some "commercial" styles before his teacher suggested classes at the Australian Ballet for "discipline and strength."

"I was terrible at it," Obarzanek says. "They took me more on potential than accomplishment. In the end, it was the challenge of it that kept me going back."

He had stints at the Queensland Ballet and the more contemporary-based Sydney Dance Company, until he figured out that he "was not very good at the company scene. I was a little bit rebellious."

He opted to do freelance choreography in Australia and Europe, and when slots opened up in a couple of Australian festivals, Obarzanek assembled a more permanent group of dancers, a composer and a designer for the first time.

"If I wanted to be a choreographer and make distinctive work, I needed to have a group who were specialized in my area," says Obarzanek. "Chunky Move was the first opportunity, and it worked."

But why call a usually ethereal art form, where artists challenge the forces of gravity, Chunky Move?

"My early work was quite ungainly," admits Obarzanek. "What would you say? An elegant ugliness. Or brutal."

The name "kind of stuck."

The Victorian government offered him "a whole lot of money" to entice him to base his company in Melbourne, where he developed a more diverse style than "chunky," one in which he made documentary-style works and those that have sophisticated technology that alters the perception of how the audience sees the body.

Chunky Move will be presenting both sides of Obarzanek's choreographic equation in two programs at the Byham Theater. The half-hour "Glow" will have two performances on both Thursday and Friday nights. The audience will be seated on the stage above a solo performer, limiting the number of seats to 150, the better to watch the "glow of a sophisticated video tracking system," where "a lone organic being mutates in and out of human form into unfamiliar, sensual and grotesque creature states."

Obarzanek is interested in dance and how it affects peoples' lives. As it develops in the theater, the piece "becomes much more about the personal issues in private lives," he explains. "Collectively these five men reveal their concerns, dreams and hopes to create quite an interesting portrait of the contemporary Australian male, which is often quite mythologized and in reality is quite different."