Dance - Pinching a nerve

The Nerve Series, Atlanta’s annual bleeding-toes curation of experimental dance, is for you fucked-up, freaky dance aficionados looking for something that reaches around and pinches your ass, sending softer souls yelping for the door.

Nervous? Good. These dances have sharp edges.

The Nerve Series was formed in 2002 to support and showcase the work of Atlanta choreographers exploring new ideas and modes of dance, artists eager to run drunk with pinking shears in a collaborative environment of like-minded dancers.

That sense of artistic community is spoken to directly in Elizabeth McCune Dishman’s “One.” Dishman, a cerebral choreographer of revelatory abstractions, says she approached “One” from “the spiritual aspects of community and oneness,” asking, “Is it possible to portray these human ideas in pure aesthetic form?”

Jhon Stronks — whose ellipses-littered dances over the past couple years have been among Atlanta’s most original (and sometimes weirdest) — will present two dances, both based on his own poems. “Violence, sung so sweetly ...” is a solo work on rage and self-pity. A group piece, “through each and ever ... shall it come to the word,” looks at, according to Stronks, “the interaction of text and movement and how they support each other as separate existences, not just interpretations of each other.”

Blake Beckham, one of the first and finest dancers to come out of the Emory University Dance Program, will present “Apologetics,” a solo work set to a text of apologies written by Eyedrum’s Robert Cheatham. New to The Nerve Series, Spelman College’s Wayne Smith will present two works of “improvography,” his in-the-moment choreography technique that uses audience movement contributions to improvise an original dance.

he Nerve Series runs March 19-21 at The Beam, 750 Glenwood Ave. Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m. $10-$12 (reservations recommended). 404-931-0846.