Patricia Hoffbauer's "Para-Dice (Stage 2) " at Danspace Paula Lobo for The New York Times Dancers performing "Para-Dice (Stage 2)," by the choreographer Patricia Hoffbauer, at Danspace Project. Three years ago, Patricia Hoffbauer presented "Para-Dice (Stage 1) " at Danspace Project, as part of a platform called "certain difficulties, certain joy." On Thursday night, she returned with "Para-Dice (Stage 2)," which, like its predecessor, takes the form of a boisterous lecture-performance on themes of colonialism, racial identity, otherness, exploitation, cultural production, the body (that's a big one) and where dance fits into it all. Brazil (where Ms. Hoffbauer is from, though she's long been based in New York) is the exoticized place, the fetishized paradise, in question. The title is perhaps a play on Pará, the second largest Brazilian state. The onslaught of information - relayed by the brashly charismatic Ms. Hoffbauer, two projection screens and seven game performers, including the video designer Peter Richards - often brings to mind the name of the 2010 series. There are certain difficulties, but there is also joy. To the choreographer's credit, you can't always separate the two. Ms. Hoffbauer, who teaches at Hunter College and Princeton University, is well equipped to parody academia. After opening remarks from her co-writer, George Emilio Sanchez, who briefs us in scholarly jargon on what we're about to see, she steers us through "Para-Dice" in the role of a relentlessly (and hilariously) patronizing professor. She is trailed by an entourage of eager students: Peggy Gould, the organized one; Alyssa Alpine, the smart one; Tom Rawe, the brunt of many jokes; and Laura Gilbert, the wide-eyed one who wants to know, "What day's the final?" They've just finished a dainty "Sound of Music" medley (a sendup of their own uptightness - and whiteness) when Ms. Hoffbauer gestures to the grainy black-and-white image on the towering screen behind her. "That's a banana leaf," she tells us. Have you ever seen one live? As she goes on to discuss the Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha, the others, or the Others - Mr. Sanchez and Elisa Osborne - quietly erect a sort of tropical hut. By the end of "Para-Dice," they'll have embodied every textbook stereotype of "the primitive." At one point, Ms. Osborne asks, "Is this a dance or what?" Who knows? Movement loosely ambles through this chaotic world, understated and pedestrian or winkingly jazzy, with references to Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer and, prominently, Arthur Mitchell tossed in. There's much talk of the pelvis, or as one performer calls it, "the visceral sphere." Ms. Hoffbauer mocks so much - Claude Lévi-Strauss, Martha Graham, herself, the audience - that you long for a moment of sincerity. One, at least, arrives toward the end, when she asks us: "Where lies your paradise?" Or is she still winking? After an hour or so, you're not entirely sure what you've learned, or what to take seriously. But this is performance, not school. For tidy postcolonial critique, you can always go to class.