A Funky Fashion Show With Wit and Imagination

A Funky Fashion Show With Wit and Imagination
The audience was agog at Dance Theater Workshop on Friday night when Maria Hassabi presented "Dead Is Dead." Bjork, a favorite of dancegoers because of her famous "whiteswan" Oscars outfit, was in the house.

The dress could well have been designed by As Four, which created the stylish shreds and clinging lam� costumes for Ms. Hassabi's new piece. Or maybe Bjork just likes dance that looks like a wittily imaginative fashion show.

The extroverted, mostly deadpan dancers, who included a Paris Hilton look-alike with bleached-blond eyebrows (Caitlin Cook) and a slouching postmodernist crooner (Michael Portnoy), strode and writhed lazily about a stage dotted with microphones and backed by a painted drop by Dash Snow and Nico Dios that looked like a graffiti depiction of a cemetery. Fake trees were hauled out for this funk spectacle's finale.

The six dancers did things with the microphones and stands that included throwing them around and gazing at them as if contemplating a stripper's pole dance. Several of them slouched against a side wall, with one curly-haired woman in pink lam� (Ms. Hassabi) breathing out a Bjorklike murmur of "beautiful, gorgeous, best, best, best."

The wildly shifting music and sound collage included not only scores by Spencer Sweeney, Ben Brunnemer and Mr. Portnoy but also rock