Faces in whiteface, kabuki-like, fiercely gazed at the audience like lifeless mannequins, as hypnotized by the dance as the audience must have been.

“New Dancemakers/Social Art” celebrated the choreographic visions of seven new dance artists — soon-to-be University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee graduates — last weekend, Dec. 8 to 11, at Mitchell Hall’s Chamber Theatre.

The more successful pieces seemed to be the ones concerned with discovering new ways of exploring live performance, exercises in freeing dance from traditional paradigms of space — pieces with strong conceptualization work behind them.

These included the pre-show performance of “Old Main” by Kate Westerlund Kosharek, which investigated the history of the building (Mitchell Hall) with dancers inhabiting staircases and window sills, ghost-like.

Amie Segal confidently married body movement, video projection, creative writing and live music (digital and acoustic) in “Well-Adjusted.” The force of the piece lay in the fact that none of the various elements included in it overshadowed the other. The substance and weight of the work was equally shared by the subtle, yet fierce reciting of socially engaged, diary-like text by one of the dancers (which was intelligently kept to a minimum) and the discreet presence of musicians on stage and the subtlety of the video images (what appeared to be a series of claymation bits suffering the somatization of the piece’s reason for being).

“Well-Adjusted” celebrated individuality and the beautifying of flaws, and even lack of synchrony with the kind of authorial self-assurance fundamental to any gratifying art piece, no matter what medium.

But what Segal’s work deftly verbalized, Susie Carlson’s “Plight of Perspective” enigmatically allegorized. A mesmerizing examination of rhythm, its implications unfolded as slowly as the long trains behind the main dancer’s dazzling costume. Four dancers, white faces in whiteface, kabuki-like, fiercely gazed at the audience like mannequins, as hypnotized by the dance as the audience must have been. It echoed an oneiric ramification of Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil (or a slow motion extrapolation of Madonna’s “Nothing Really Matters” video, minus the exhibitionism).

Other highlights include Jessica Brady’s abrupt ending in “From Within” and the costumes for Elizabeth Torres’ “Different Similarities.”

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