Dance - On wheels and feet

Many cosmologists believe that the only reliable way to determine the direction of your movement through time is to watch for evidence of entropy. Thus, as artists have always known, creation is a discrete reversal of time, a defiance of dissipation, a free-climb up the slick walls of the rapacious temporal well.

“Entropy” might sound like the title of an exhausted existential work in the “No Exit” mode. But the dance, one of three premiering at this weekend’s Full Radius Dance show at 7 Stages, is not a nihilist surrender. It is, rather, a reclaiming of vitality through continual recreation.

Guest choreographer Hilary Benedict has set dancers’ improvised movements to ever-changing rhythms: clear-voiced ethereal chants, groin-grinding jazz, an Irish/African fusion and binary techno beats. The dancers unfurl a mass of fabric in interlocking spirals and through a series of spherical cat’s cradle transformations.

“Finding Family” was inspired by a series of funerals that brought artistic director Douglas Scott back in touch with his relations in the Kentucky mountains. Despite the formidable distance between Scott’s life as a gay artist in Atlanta and the coal-mining culture of his kin, his family treated him with an easy familiarity. “We were blood related, and that’s all they needed to know,” says Scott. The dance that emerged is a search for identity in both dusty-throated Appalachian folk songs and modern re-interpretations of Bach classics.

Full Radius, which features some dancers in wheelchairs, always has a hint of social commentary in its shows. In “I Am,” the message is more explicit. Margo Gathright-Dietrich relays her nightmare attempt to travel with her motorized wheelchair. Teal Sherer conveys her college roommates’ shock upon learning she has a sex life. It’s not a subtle work, but the stories are illuminating and some are lyrically told. Tango-inflected movements weave the stories together with a playful flair.

Full Radius performs I Am... June 20 at 8p.m. and June 21 at 3 & 8 p.m. at 7 Stages, 1105 Euclid Ave. 404-724-9663. www.7stages.org.