Dance - Sail away home

Three paintings from the Louvre, three cello songs performed by Yo-Yo Ma and a passage from Victor Hugo’s The Toilers of the Sea. In the nexus of this intensely interdisciplinary collection of inspirations, choreographer Douglas Scott has found one of his finest dances. As the Horizon Fades, premiering in its entirety this weekend at 7 Stages, sails the spiritual seas in flight from an angry present toward a distant misty shore. (The Hugo passage observes that as one horizon falls behind, another appears ahead.) The dance is set on Scott’s Full Radius Dance, a “physically integrated” company that includes some dancers who dance in wheelchairs.

The dance begins in Eugene Delacroix’s proto-Impressionist “The Lion Hunt” (1854), a painting with a savage whirlwind of intense reds, golds and blacks. With a tango by Astor Piazzolla (from a recording, as with all the music, of cellist Yo-Yo Ma), the movement expresses both the energy and form of the painting: confrontational, circular and somewhat cynical.

Lucien Levy-Dhurmer’s painting “Woman with Medal” (1896) (or “Mystery”) and a melancholy Bach fugue comprise the second movement, a passage. There is a suggestion, as in the painting, of a story both noble and sad. The dancers move first in isolation, then slowly toward quiet intimacy. There is no sense of place, only of momentum, of a pendulum or the rocking of a ship on the open ocean.

Arriving on the far shore, the final movement is set to an Appalachian lullaby with a choral chant. Dwight William Tryon’s “Sunrise: April” gives a misted field to dance upon, with soft-shaped trees lined up a hillside. “We’ve arrived where we’re supposed to be,” explains Scott. In form, the dance returns to the first movement’s circles, but now with a sylvan feel. The dancers spin like children, at play in the meadows of a finer shore.

Also in the show: Scott’s “5 x 7,” a meditation on fate set on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and guest choreographer Hilary Benedict’s “Skipping Stones,” a lovely, sensual and languid work with the feel of a Southern high summer at dusk.

Full Radius Dance presents As the Horizon Fades, June 4-5 at 7 Stages, 1105 Euclid Ave. 8 p.m., with a 3 p.m. Saturday matinee. $12-$15. 404-724-9663. www.fullradiusdance.org.