Chris Elam has fashioned a distinctive, engagingly bizarre choreographic style out of a propensity for tying bodies in knots and intensive studies of Balinese dance. In his solo Tin Man, he treats his body as if it were one of those puzzles involving interlocking rings. If this part slips through here, can this then move there? He seems to stand forever on one leg figuring out strategies. In duets, any erotic implications of body parts in close conjunction are subordinate to images of clumsy tenderness, as two people use each other as seats, ladders, cradles, and mazes. Elam has casually acknowledged an aesthetic kinship with Pilobolus and Momix, but his work is odder and more intimately human.

The Balinese influence crops up in, say, a lunge or spraddle-legged walk, topped by lifted shoulders and outspread arms. It's particularly evident in Ten Feet, in which five dancers in shaggy brown costumes and headpieces with manes prance into curious relationships; someone's foot may get temporarily stuck on someone else's back.

In Hush Fire, set to original music by Andy Teirstein, Laura Pocius and Jason Somma's living knots‹whether perverse or inevitable‹bespeak affectionate curiosity. In Dreams of Your Acceptance, Abbey Dehnert and Amber Sloan are more playful (at one point Sloan grabs her breasts and makes them "speak" to Sloan). In the duet that opens Our Town, Pocius and Dehnert vie for dominance. But this fascinating dance also involves rambunctious Jennifer Harmer, who inserts herself into their entanglements, at one point trying to keep her head grafted onto Pocius. Eliza Littrell, a puzzled loner, further complicates intersections that suggest not just ingenious designs but road maps of a community. In Maggie and George, to Teirstein's music for Jew's harp and a sweet old song ("When You and I Were Young, Maggie"), Elam and Dehnert's touching adventures with two window frames call to mind the jungle in all of us, but also a long, happy life together.

It's a question how far Elam can take his stylistic choices or how he'll develop, but right now his skill and clarity of vision delight the soul.