Dominique Zeltzman and Selene Colburn.

In "House Heroines," their latest program, Dominique Zeltzman and Selene Colburn are naifs with a sly and intentionally raw view of how girl bodies hurl and fall and galumph through space like thrown rods in a giant engine.

Zeltzman's the one with the cropped red hair who pulls in her lips, spits in her hands, and rubs them together before she sets off on a glorious dud of a leap. Her physical comedy is one part Little Rascals and one part Shelley Duvall. Colburn is the straight lady. She has a chiseled face with the torqued energy of a cubist painting and a hard body that smashes against Zeltzman's limpidness with a taut, muscular will.

They are inseparable from the ugly green plastic doormats they throw down on the studio floor in On Our Mats. At one point, after they perform a set of simple movements in canon that seem to have sifted up from memories of gym class, they fake a run and a lift. From this unprepossessing stuff Zeltzman and Colburn manage to show the dreamy, sputtering side of physical action.

Colburn is a compelling combination of the unstudied and the rigorous in her dark solo about sexual threat, Out of the Look. With her feet jammed in fifth position and her shoulders hoisted back she looks like a fish just pulled from the sea. Zeltzman and Colburn scribble a witty laundry list of gestures and opposing movement textures in Finest Futility/Almost Pristine, from John Travolta's shuffle to the tics of someone on Thorazine.

The program as a whole was deliciously quirky but uneven. Guest choreographer Melody Swett's Waiting for a Sub seemed no more than alienated play, and Colburn's Small Town Doctor So and So looked like the work of a student. Zeltzman and Colburn are at their best when gender and social expectations are not so much ideas to dance about as the very ground on which they dance. They insist on showing us that dancing is hard physical work. When they throw their legs up in chorus-line kicks or run off a series of porn poses, they are not only commenting on how women are seen but on how hilarious it is when these stereotypes are superimposed on plain old girls.