Last month, La MaMa Experimental Theatre presented an impressive dance festival celebrating their 45th year, and including the work of fifty- odd choreographers and companies.

It would be glib and inaccurate to make a connection between Le Vu Long/Together Higher’s company, Together Higher’s dancers’ deftness and the ferocity of their dancing in Stories of Us performed at Dance Theater Workshop in March.

Susan Marshall celebrated her company’s twentieth anniversary (and temporary survival on the brink of financial ruin) at Dance Theater Workshop last month with Cloudless.

Surface differences aside, Brooklyn-based Beth Gill’s “wounded giant” and Tokyo-based Kakuya Ohashi’s “Wish You Were Here,” presented together recently at the Kitchen, have more in common than a spare aesthetic and a detached air. Even though, as curator Yasuko Yokoshi remarked, “Kakuya’s approach is more psychological and Beth’s is more about physical space,” both dances respond to the perils and nature of urban existence.

For the uninitiated, there are often two common responses to dance: bafflement or boredom. Reasons for these reactions vary from work to work. Some choreographers create works with a narrative or theme that either doesn’t quite communicate or one that has gone too far beyond any level of comprehension. A dance doesn’t have to be intellectual to be good, but like any other art form, dance isn’t very forgiving of artistic laziness or a lack of clarity and thematic structure. This is perhaps more true of dance, which relies on movement, or the nonverbal, as a means of expression.