"Restless Eye," by David Neumann, at New York Live Arts The layers of information come fast and furious in David Neumann's work. And what finally arrives is never straightforward; the messages are scrambled, sometimes hopelessly so. Restless Eye Kennis Hawkins, front, and Andrew Dinwiddie of the Advanced Beginner Group performing in this David Neumann work at New York Live Arts. This is especially the case in his newest dance, the well-titled "Restless Eye," which had its premiere on Saturday night at New York Live Arts. It is a powerful work, and a resonant one, showing Mr. Neumann once again to be an astute, sensitive observer of the human condition in all its funny and desperate and, finally, beautiful frailty. "Restless Eye" thrums with a longing for communication and with despair over our limitations, evoking Flaubert's line from "Madame Bovary": "Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars." Yet Mr. Neumann, who tends to use a lot of spoken and recorded speech, has something Flaubert did not: the human body. To be more precise, he has five bodies: those of Andrew Dinwiddie, Kennis Hawkins, Neal Medlyn, Jeremy Olson and Victoria Roberts-Wierzbowski, who are credited in the program as helping to create the work (along with Mr. Neumann's excellent nonperforming collaborators, including the playwright Sibyl Kempson, who wrote the nuanced text). Though Mr. Neumann's troupe, the Advanced Beginner Group, is not a formal company but a fluid, project-by-project collective, there is still something of a house style in his dances, a sensibility at once windblown and wise. In "Restless Eye" this quietly paradoxical consistency reads most finely in the performances of Mr. Dinwiddie, Ms. Hawkins and Mr. Medlyn, veteran Advanced Beginners whose experience and rapport shine here. But Mr. Neumann, who has a long history in theater and dance, has a keen eye for casting, and this strong ensemble is a pleasure throughout. The dancers travel singly and in packs, in gusts across a largely stripped stage, which Christine Shallenberg has lighted in shifting patterns of dark and light, as if the theater were engulfed in fast-moving weather systems. Tei Blow's subtle but evocative sound and video designs add another texture, with often corrupted images and ambient noises coming and going like the dreams you can almost remember upon waking. It is fascinating to see the ways that Mr. Neumann is building from "Big Eater," a previous and less successful work that, you suspect, cleared the way for the subtle structures at play here. A sturdy little house sits in a corner, its empty white interior often drenched in Mr. Blow's video. Gordon Landenberger designed the set. The dancers periodically enter it, as if hoping to be transported back in time; at other moments they describe evocative settings and scenes, their bodies cutting languid arcs through space. Kaye Voyce's varied, all-white costumes suggest a garden party, but what is the occasion? Perhaps the end of time; "Restless Eye" at moments brings to mind the deliciously strange and sulky ennui of a movie like "Melancholia." Like that unsettling film by Lars von Trier, the dance wraps messy human desires around a false promise of science, vines strangling a host. Mr. Medlyn refers several times to trees, calling them "helpless observers rooted in place" and asks, "what does the mounting dread mount to?" He gets no answer, at least none that satisfies. Dread, and other emotions, mount only to dissipate, much as the dancers coalesce briefly into patterns before collapsing, staring at one another or into space with a torpor that is somehow charged. They are spent, but still waiting for something. Will it come? And will they recognize it when it does? "Restless Eye" runs through Sunday at New York Live Arts, 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 924-0077, newyorklivearts.org