Cori Olinghouse at Danspace Project Cori Olinghouse Ms. Olinghouse, left, channeling Buster Keaton, and Michelle Dorrance in "Ghost lines" at Danspace Project. What happens when entertainment becomes mixed up with experimentation? The choreographer and dancer Cori Olinghouse is haunted by the connection between vaudeville and the Dada and Surrealism movements - so much so that she created a couple of ghosts. In her latest work, performed at Danspace Project on Thursday, Ms. Olinghouse explores the relationship between genres with "Ghost line," a 16-millimeter black-and-white film, and "Ghost lines," a dance. In the movie, a collaboration with the filmmaker Shona Masarin, a clear inspiration is "Ballet Méchanique," the stunning Dadaist post-Cubist art film by Léger. In "Ghost line," the camera closes in on Ms. Olinghouse's face and torso and then pulls back, swallowing the image with it. The timing and patterns of bodies and shapes - growing, shrinking and receding - lend "Ghost line" a kaleidoscopic sensation. The waifish Ms. Olinghouse bounces from one character to the next: she's a clown, Buster Keaton, a statue. She draws lines in the air with her fingers, which manifest into swirling lines on screen; eventually her image floats, like an eerie ghost, in front of a series of vibrating abstract lines and shapes. In the live performance, a collection of solos performed simultaneously, Ms. Olinghouse is joined by Eva Schmidt, whose shadowy figure also appeared in the film. Her entire body, including her face, is covered in black, rendering her two-dimensional; her puff-sleeved top by Andrew Jordan is a sculptural wonder, as are all his costumes in this show. Elizabeth Keen, with vaudevillian exaggeration, performs a soft-shoe routine with a feather touch, while Michelle Dorrance pushes backward in silky skater strokes and, later, calls on all of her gangly elegance in a reconstruction of Hal Le Roy's eccentric tap solo from "The High School Hoofer." She reappears in head-to-toe black as a shadow dancer, knotting and untangling her feet in enormous clown shoes. But Mina Nishimura is the most realized ghost of all. Wearing a patterned clown suit as if it is haute couture, she wilts with such a subtle command of pathos and control that her body instantly becomes a container of many pasts. Yet in "Ghost lines," where strangeness and slapstick struggle to coexist, it gradually becomes clear that beyond more imaginative lighting - the blackouts, for one, are overdone - something is missing. Ms. Olinghouse has the tools; she needs to make her own history. Cori Olinghouse continues through Saturday at Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village; 866-811-4111, danspaceproject.org.