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'One/The Body's Grace,' set to bits of Handel, Gluck, and Bach, showed, as the program noted, "three sensuous pas de deux showing couples in various stages of their relationships with one another." Well, perhaps sensuality is in the eye of the beholder, but Hill presented his couples in such complex and angular interactions (there's much entwining, flipping each other about and tumbling over and into each other) that sensuality was the last thing I felt. Each of the three couples seemed to represent stages of relationships long used in such works (I flashed back to Jerome Robbins' 'In the Night,'), with one couple feeling each other out in a fresh, new relationship, another physically confrontational and the last a mature pair moving almost as one, yet Hill's particular conceit seemed to be to express these relations not so much through familiar gestures of endearment and lust, but in movements far more abstracted: we recognize that a couple's reached a certain intimacy when they begin to echo each other's angular poses, say, lying on one's chest on the stage with one's legs arced up at some particularly extreme angle. Hill's enamored of hard, hard stuff, and my heart went out to the woman who had to remain in an unsupported, flat-footed arabesque penchee for longer than anyone should ever have to (my own calves started to tremble in sympathy with her shakes).

Next was a Holocaust memorial dance with the perhaps too-evocative title of 'Ashes,' set to a moving score by Arvo Pärt. The program notes explain that this piece has something to do with the "circle of life," and, indeed, the dancers spend much time pacing slowly about the stage in a big circle, entering and leaving its center in various combinations and interacting in ways which suggest they're moving through rather dolorous incarnations on this earth. Again, Hill often goes for a convoluted vocabulary, and 'Ashes' seemed both repetitive and oddly unaffecting, despite its lofty memorializing.

The world premiere of 'Desire and Three Movements' (I never quite made sense of the title) began with a long duet for Gina Patterson and Eric Midgley to the same Arvo Pärt used memorably last year by Christopher Wheeldon in his duet for Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto in 'After the Rain.' Eerily, Hill found much in the Pärt which echoed Wheeldon in both duets there's much exploration of the woman giving up her weight to her partner (it is, indeed, a kinetic theme of all of Hill's presented works), and how that's expressed often in slow-motion lifts and the like. But where Wheeldon's duet ends with his couple lying entwined onstage, Hill has Patterson walk off, leaving Midgley looking particularly bereft. The rest of 'Desire and Three Movements,' set to a high-voltage Steve Reich score, seemed among the freest and happiest of Hill's works, perhaps because it was not as freighted with meaning as the first two pieces. While here, too, there was much convoluted and awkward invention, there were also moments of simple joyousness, as in a rousing duet for Lisa Washburn and Paul Michael Bloodgood.

I left that evening thinking that perhaps I'd have liked the works better with a bit less invention, and a bit more simplicity.