Tatyana Tenenbaum's "Private Country" at Chocolate Factory Andrea Mohin/The New York Times Private Country Talya Epstein, above, in this Tatyana Tenenbaum piece combining movement with original script at the Chocolate Factory. "Private Country," a hybrid work choreographed, composed, written and directed by Tatyana Tenenbaum, creates a theatrical world of its own. But many features of the landscape are familiar. Ms. Tenenbaum's use of the voice recalls Robert Ashley and Meredith Monk. The flat delivery of text, both odd and banal, echoes much downtown theater (like that of Yoshiko Chuma, in whose works Ms. Tenenbaum has performed, or Richard Maxwell). Wry nostalgia and thematic and scenic elements call to mind the films of Wes Anderson, as much "Moonrise Kingdom" as "The Royal Tenenbaums." "Private Country," which debuted at the Chocolate Factory on Wednesday, sometimes feels submerged under those influences (among others), but it's also alive with formal experimentation and glints of a fresh voice. The human voice is at the core of Ms. Tenenbaum's investigations: the continuum between speech and song, the relationships between vocal production and movement. When the six performers - who include Ms. Tenenbaum and her brother Ezra - speak, they push intonation, elongating their vowels. When they sing, they upset their bodily instruments, moving and shaking. The vocal music, often sung over a drone, ranges from chant to chromatic oscillations and complex harmonies. The choreography spans from purposely awkward theatrical blocking to poses, folk dance, short contemporary-style repetitions and elaborate mime. The performance is divided into three main parts, the first of which isolates the siblings in the theater's basement. The remaining sections take place upstairs in the main space, amid fake birds by Ms. Tenenbaum's mother, Anne Krauss. Each section is centered on a duet, and much of the work's formal excitement arises from the interaction or tension between the vocal arrangements (antiphonal, dialogical, harmonized) and the physical ones. Ms. Tenenbaum plays with people speaking and singing into each other's faces, or backs, or past each other, or turning to the audience to soliloquize. The words they say and sing are the kind of collage that tempts a critic to construct a review solely out of quotations from the script (like "I can fairly say that not too much happens"). There are meanings and connections, private and public, if you care to trace them, but the words are manipulated into abstractions, sounds, swerves in tone that don't always land right. Apart from the formal experimentation, what makes "Private Country" most interesting is yet another influence: musical theater. Ms. Tenenbaum intermittently focuses on the traditional motive for speech to become song, what her text calls "honest feeling." The work has a climax, in which the cast floods the stage with harmonies and motion and motifs established earlier, singing about a flood. The pure research that Ms. Tenenbaum presents in "Private Country" could be applied with great expressive power. "Private Country" continues through Saturday at the Chocolate Factory, 5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens; 212-352-3101, chocolatefactorytheater.org.