produced in collaboration with the Antwerp, Belgium-based Toneelhuis theater collective.

Cherkaoui has rightly garnered a reputation as a rising star in the European pantheon; to his credit, he pursues myths of self and the world as they manifest through personal fears, moral aspirations, the thirst for knowledge, the assurances of history, ghost stories and popular culture.

And where better to locate the search for answers than in a library?

Here, amid an elaborate jungle gym of sliding bookcases, secret compartments and glowing panels, the Belgian Moroccan choreographer introduces a rogue's gallery of strangers idly milling about with books in hand, knitting or rifling through the shelves, seemingly enjoying the respite of the peaceful surrounds.

After their calm is invaded by a chorus of black-clad figures who slink across the stage like wispsSpanish, Swedish, Flemish, Slovak, American and Australian English, Vietnamese, Italian, Thai, French, German and the dramatic intonations of Japanese anime), the able cast was aided by the discordant tonalities of vocalist Patrizia Bovi and Ensemble Micrologus' medieval polyphony, performed live from a perch above the fray on the multistory set.

Language, though, eluded the poltergeist-like beings, who nevertheless spoke volumes through antics ranging from the humorous -- manually titillating the psychology-spouting Ulrika Kinn Sevensson before sucking her into a bookcase -- to the eerie and even violent, as when the acrobatic, animalistic trio of Damien Fournier, Damien Jalet and Satoshi Kudo demonstrated that their bite was worse than their bark.

Deftly buoyant in their physicality, the figures caromed around the stage in elastic movement sequences that mobilized bodies through a