Its unifying conceit - treating the dance as an athletic event, complete with harsh calls by the referee ("Time!" "Holding!" "Saturation of Content!") - is fun and effective, especially given the athletic quality of the much of the movement. Two color commentators, heard in voice-over comparing rookie and veteran dancers of Bazell's works, and even ripping into the choreography, seemed to propose an end run around criticisms of the piece.

The number of players on the field also kept changing, from large-group full deployment to small and medium-size groupings. One notable smaller tableau had dancer Katie McNamara seated around a family dinner table with Mom, Dad and sibs, trying to inject her own concerns into a blithely clueless conversation. This playlet, a portrait of the artist as angst-ridden teen, felt burdened by its naturalism, in contrast to some more poetic mixing of words and movement at other points.

The larger-group passages, generally word-free, felt released into a fevered momentum, with wonderfully muscular riffs on wrestling, soccer, line dancing, gymnastics, and other unison movements. Coming as they did between the more emotionally charged sections, they carried a sense of searching for healing through movement itself. The warmer light of these big passages reinforced a feeling of safety in this large community of movers, as opposed to the potential dangers of the more intimate interactions. Some of the smaller moments included a pair of women lying together, lit by flashlights, and solo turns by Katharine Livingston, bare-bellied and very pregnant.

The last part of "Endzone" pulled the audience through the telling and dancing of some horrific stories, memories of the brutalizing of women in war. Their intensity spiked so much higher than the rest of the work, I was left with the feeling that they needed to be treated in a separate piece, rather than coexisting in what's really a big pastiche.

The humiliation of a figure of male power (played by Tony Lawton), in a final sequence involving undressing and red paint, felt like the ultimate revenge fantasy of the victim over her victimizer.

There are no additional performances.