Jo Strømgren is come and gone. And PIFOF is (nearly) dead; long live PIFOF!

The Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts, the Cultural trust's lavish 250th birthday gift to Pittsburgh, is dwindling down to tonight's two final performances, the delicious "El Eco de la Sombra" from Barcelona (Ellis School Armory, 7-11 p.m., and if you have a ticket, you are fortunate indeed) and "13 Most Beautiful ... Songs for Andy Warhol's 'Screen Tests,' " which as I write hasn't even had the first of two performances.

That's how quickly some of the eight international companies have passed through since PIFOF began Oct. 10. Among these fleeting delicacies has been Jo Strømgren Kompani, a Norwegian dance/theater which Thursday and Friday at the New Hazlett staged "The Department," a funny/uncomfortable Kafka-esque vision of four bureaucrats serving some unseen, oppressive state.

The imagery is all overhead lights, gray file cabinets, pneumatic tubes conveying urgent, unintelligible messages and secret passages. That, plus paranoid responses to flashing lights and inexplicable performances, the whole conveyed in marvelously expressive, vaguely Eastern European gibberish over microphones leading who knows where, is pure satiric dystopia -- more Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" than Kafka terror.

But in the hands of the four talented performers, life intervenes, and also art, like a flowering weed forcing itself up through concrete. They share their fears, but also hopes; competition, but also fellowship.

The result is ferociously comic, but touching. Who would want to live in such a world (to what extent do we already?), but even the faceless have faces when you look closely.