Ishmael Houston-Jones and Yvonne Meier at Abrons During his contribution to a shared evening as part of the American Realness festival at the Abrons Arts Center on Sunday, the choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones took on animal cruelty, bondage, teenage murderers and Satan worship. But the part that most likely triggered traumatic memories came before all of that, at the very beginning, when the audience was herded onto the stage and greeted by a nervous-seeming man in a sweater vest and tie. The setting was clear: a high-school assembly. Steven Schreiber for The New York Times Ishmael Houston-Jones and Yvonne Meier: Emily Wexler in Ms. Meier's "Mad Heidi" at Abrons Arts Center on Sunday. The evening, part of American Realness, also included Mr. Houston-Jones's "Knife/Tape/Rope." This was how Mr. Houston-Jones, wonderfully droll as the sweater-vested drama teacher, framed excerpts from "Knife/Tape/Rope," his 1989-90 collaboration with Dennis Cooper and Jonathan Walker. Wordless movements alternated with the spoken confessions of two Satan-worshiping teenagers who murdered a classmate. This work was based on a true story, one of those that seemed so common in the "80s. The music, most of all, brought back the era: Guns N" Roses; Wall of Voodoo; Kate Bush, slowed down into a voice-of-the-devil bass. Dragging a bound and hooded Robert Maynard by a rope, Jeremy Pheiffer was credible as a numbed adolescent, bored enough to be cruel for a thrill. His flat delivery of Mr. Cooper's text communicated the banality of evil. In her sexually charged wrestling duet with Mr. Pheiffer, Gillian Walsh effectively expressed the will to power, the desire for dominance, of a metal chick, taking a baseball bat to a bag that we later learn might have contained a kitten. She nicely underplayed the rationale for the murder: "because it's fun." The movement sections fleshed out the emotional back story, rather than illustrating the text. And having Mr. Pheiffer and Ms. Walsh handcuffed or bound as they gave their confessions was a strong directorial choice. Yet the tongue-in-cheek framing of the work as a cautionary tale about the dangers of drugs and heavy metal only underlined the age of the material. This version of the banality of evil now feels rather banal. Rope and frustration also figured in the second half of Sunday's program, Yvonne Meier's "Mad Heidi." In this new solo, Emily Wexler, a big girl in braids, embodied and resisted Swiss stereotypes. Ms. Meier is from Switzerland. Her Heidi was mad about something, beating the stage with a rope, stomping all around and later hurling forks at a board. There was a touch of absurdity in her turning leaps. Even if I hadn't been primed for "80s references, I might have thought of "Flashdance." There were glints of wit as she, fully nude, rubbed a broom between her legs, a pole dance for an Alpine witch. The fur dress she crawled into, which rattled as she moved and pulled her off balance, was a marvelous prop. And when the walnuts inside it flew out, that was a fine bit of theatrical whimsy. But each section was slack internally, one underdeveloped idea strung onto the next. Ms. Wexler's performance, though forceful, lacked the abandon to justify its loose construction. Tying together an episodic dance requires more than just rope.