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Dancers from the Stephen Petronio Company display inventive movements.

When casting for his company, Stephen Petronio looks for dancers who have a fearless attitude toward dancing awkwardly and probably even looking stupid. Luckily for the eight dancers who performed at Royce Hall last Friday, only the fearless energy shone through.

The three-part program exhibited Petronio’s distinct dance vocabulary of aggressive jerking yet clean graceful lines – along with splashes of his dancers’ personal flair – through solo dances and contact improvisation.

Petronio opened the night with two cathartic pieces: his solo piece “Broken Man” and the Sept. 11, 2001-influenced “City of Twist.” The succinct solo piece progressed from feelings of frailty shown through crouched fetal positions to fits of vigor with wider arm motions and longer strides that ended in a pose conveying a confidence from taking back what was lost.

For “City of Twist,” the women, clad in black, reflective sparkles, satin or rhinestones, glided across backdrops of a shadowy tenement, fire escapes or a night-lit skyline. The climax of “Twist” was a sexually charged encounter in which a female was held up in various positions by other dancers. She slowly descended toward the male on the floor for a kiss. After this heated scene, there were some interesting sequences, but for the most part, ‘Twist’s’ ambient music became draining.

At the end of the night, less than 10 individuals stood in ovation of Petronio and his dancers, which meant either the audience was apathetic and unimpressed or they didn’t catch Petronio’s winking humor in the show’s closing piece “Island of Misfit Toys.”

Of all the pieces in the show, ‘Toys’ provided the most visual stimulation with a dysfunctional doll propped on either end of the stage and a totem poll of doll heads in the center, the most engaging music courtesy of rock icon Lou Reed’s medley of songs, and the most childish costumes with the female dancers in dolled-up ruffled skirts and the male dancers in pajamas.

Familiar ballet steps tied the pieces together and kept them accessible through the noisy “Metal Machine Music” and excerpts of “13 Meditations on Poe.” Traces of popular dance – the late-1980s running man and a bit of tap pizzazz – were thrown in with more complex choreography to juxtapose the ridiculous with the artsy and demonstrate how both can be equally fulfilling.

Petronio’s choreographing of ‘Island’ to the music infuses a feeling of lively visual storytelling into an otherwise abstract dance. Dancing to Reed’s “I’m Waiting For My Man,” the dancers may not have been making an enlightening statement, but they leapt with gleeful energy that showed they were actually enjoying themselves.

-Rhea Cortado