Not all is as forecast

There’s more than arms to “Arms,” the dance created in 1984 that served as a prelude to the West Coast premiere of Susan Marshall’s “Cloudless” on Friday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. And, of course, there were clouds in “Cloudless.”

The lesson is that the 2000 MacArthur Fellowship choreographer is a trickster who has her postmodern cake and eats it too. She delivered emotionally powerful dramatic vignettes and then undercut them almost immediately. Sometimes, you wish she had just left them alone.

“Arms” was basically a stationary duet that consisted almost entirely of arm gestures. But danced by Darrin M. Wright and Luke Miller, the five-minute piece wasn’t just about movement. It evoked an erotic relationship of need and shifting control.

Marshall placed it at the start of the program to signal a break from the full-evening works she’s created over the last decade and a return to such early pieces as “Arms” that operate, she wrote in the program notes, “like poems in terms of their economy, density and brevity.”

“Cloudless,” created in collaboration with Marshall’s five dancers for the company’s 20th anniversary, consists of 18 such pieces. Titles such as “Runner” and “Solo With Table” told you pretty much what you got. But others only hinted at the richness that lay ahead.

Take “The Sound.” Joseph Poulson kept his hand over the mouth of Kristen Hollinsworth. Whenever he took it away, she emitted one of those stifled screams you make when you’re having a nightmare. Sometimes he also stopped the scream with a kiss. Was this all about a man’s total domination of a woman? Could he possibly have been helping her? Toward the end, the roles were shared. Both were screaming, both were stifling the other’s cries with their hands. Whatever was going on wasn’t simple.

The most powerful piece, however, was “Book.” Basically, Poulson and Miller sat at a table before a thick book whose pages were rapidly turned over by the action of a nearby fan. Behind them, Wright and Hollinsworth occasionally stood to whisper something into their ears.

It didn’t take long to sense, from the image and the dancers’ serious demeanor, that this was the book of life. But who were Wright and Hollinsworth? Friends? Inner selves? Guardian angels? Whatever they were, after every whispered comment, Poulson and Miller increasingly found emotional common ground as the book “expired.”

The first part of the program ended with this poignant image, and the second half opened with it. The repetition made something tragic look comic.

Other juxtapositions undercut emotional moments with pure movement pieces, as if to say that lingering in straightforward emotion isn’t hip. Too bad for us.

Petra van Noort had the title solo. Deborah Farre created the cloud sculpture. Marshall drew on pop tunes and music by Philip Glass, Jane Shaw and Bizet as transformed by rocker David Byrne.

It was all terrifically danced even if only some of the pieces were memorable.

chris.pasles@latimes.com