Dancemakers.

Serge Bennathan's choreography tackles big issues: death, friendship, and the conflict of opposing cultures. In its first New York season since he became director, his Toronto-based company, Dancemakers, performed ambitious work which showed itself capable of deep feeling but often let dramatic staging overwhelm emotional content.

The more successful of the two works was the 1994 Sable/Sand. Bennathan, a Frenchman, dedicated the work to his father, who was born in French North Africa. Accompanied by a haunting score by Egyptian-born composer Ahmed Hassan, dancers in tank tops and tapered jeans trade between modern and ritual dance to suggest an intersection of cultures: Women place their hands at the backs of their heads and their arms make the shape of butterfly wings, while a group of men dance in a pool of mottled light that looks like it is descending through a canopy of leaves. This exploration of the unfamiliar effectively conjures a traveler's sense of displacement, balanced with moments that make it seem possible to integrate into a foreign landscape.

While Sable/Sand effectively connects atmosphere with emotion, Bennathan's 1993 Chronicles of a Simple Life, dedicated to a friend who died of complications from AIDS, takes on a harder task. The dancing veers between full-throttle physicality, the kind that seems to represent life lived to its fullest, and moments where memory is acted out in scenes of bittersweet loss. Gerry Trentham strips down to his underwear and is laid among other company members, forming a pieta. In another scene he and Gary Tai converse and laugh sotto voce. Later, two female dancers stamp on each other's feet and chase one another across the stage, tag-style.

There is much powerhouse dancing, yet it's performed with an odd hesitancy and a tentativeness which creates the impression that feeling is being restrained. But when three bodies tumbling across the stage are dodged or casually stepped over by dancers moving in the opposite direction, the strange currents of life and death are made resonant in simple, unconscious movement.