by Courtenay Nearburg

She shudders, twists, awkwardly yet somehow gracefully capturing frenzied energy in her jerklike motions. Her left arm leads the rest of her body, propelling her into empty space, a black stage, and she reaches out into the space, her expression tortured, as Bjork yodels to an industrial beat. In black t-shirt, black slacks and barefoot, slender and electric, Margery Segal is a live wire on the stage of the Hyde Park Theatre. Her choreography is mayhem, shot through with inexhaustible longing, and the duality of desire and control.

Rather apocalyptic in content, Personal Dances II, a festival of dance presented by Segal's Nerve Dance Company (Crash), lives up to its name, almost embarrassing in its intimacy. The effect can be discomforting, as if you are peeking into someone's windows, but envigorating, like getting away with it. A glimpse into what can often be an abusive world, a distant, cold, mechanical place -- and yet, one filled with characters, rich and colorful, enthused with humor and delight.

Some of Austin's most exciting artists participated in Personal Dances II. Riding on the heels of the inordinately successful FronteraFest '97, a five-week roller coaster ride of amazing theater and dance, Personal Dances was really a showcase of some of the pioneers of performance art. After writing and producing ambient love rites for FronteraFest '97, Daniel Alexander Jones was right back on stage for Personal Dances II, cajoling the audience with his innocent face and steamy choreography. Jones oozes sex with his puppy dog stare, silently begging each person to come hither, yet it is the ingenuity that is alluring, the naivete that frightens with its seductive power.

Jones is almost a clown, childlike and joyous, then melancholy and exhausted. He uses text sparingly, to establish relationships, and music is kept to minimum as well, brief spurts of disco and soul washing over the performance, seizing the performer for frenetic moments, then dying away.

Quite different from the "Aria Inertia" of Jason Phelps, a catastrophic journey into a schizophrenic mind tortured by childhood memories of sunny yellow kitchens and the atomic bomb. Styled similarly to Segal's dance performance, Phelps explodes on stage, kinky and kinetic, overflowing with his memoir, the words flooding over the frantic dance, entwining with the motion, poignant in its loneliness, and comic in its madness. Jungle music pounds through the fragmented light, Phelps' body breaks each barrier, his voice pierces the blackness. He is clearly out of control; then, washed in white light, he is arrested. Agonizingly slow, he revolves on the edge of the stage, teetering between peace and pain.

Personal Dances II celebrated individual journeys, the pathways of the soul that are so often a part of our subconcious and are never revealed to the world or even to our intimates. Segal, Jones, and Phelps explore these realms of themselves, then translate the experience into poetic motion. The result transcends modern dance and modern theatre, molding the two forms into one cathartic release of pure spirit. Nerve Dance Company has just what it claims: a lot of nerve.