The theremin is an electronic instrument, patented in 1928, which consists of a couple of antennae that the performer does not actually need to touch to make sound. Instead, the performer simply waves his hands in the air around the antennae, calling forth sounds almost as if he were conducting an invisible orchestra. The theremin has a buzzy tone and no set tuning (it slides right across pitches as the performer’s hands move, rather than stepping neatly from one note to the next), and so, while theremin virtuosi exist (and can play, you know, “Ave Maria”), I think that Justin Jones and his partner in crime, Elliott Durko Lynch, have found the true use of the theremin—as a toy for avant-garde performance.

Jones and Lynch’s RadioBrain is an audio geek’s fever dream of equipment, wires, microphones, clip lamps, and that theremin, all manipulated by two nervous, twitchy guys outfitted for nerd summer camp in white t-shirts, khaki shorts, tube socks, and sneakers. Dance to music is not the modus operandi here. Instead, it’s frenetic dial-twiddling and switch-setting, and the hieroglyphic gestures that derive from this activity—hermetic, confined, functional. But when Jones starts up the theremin, RadioBrain’s narrow world opens out—or winds in on itself, I’m not sure which. Watching Jones’s long, articulate hands make sounds—seeing the sounds—alters one’s perception for the duration. Suddenly the ragged visible appears as the underpinning for an invisible realm. All gestures cast forth aural landscapes. And vice versa: all sounds (beyond the theremin, there is an abundance of staticked-out music, bomb ticking, ocean and pebbles) cast forth movement.

More confusion of perception arises from the verbal notes that Kristin Van Loon, offstage, begins intoning. She’s describing the performance as it goes, in brief snippets of reductive noticing (“coming toward me,” “closer,” “short hair”, “stripes on ankles”). Where, ordinarily, you might narrate a few things to yourself, Van Loon narrates everything, constantly, making it impossible for you to maintain the usual internal monologue. Instead, you’re challenged to perceive and supersede Van Loon’s seeing. Hard on the heels of this comes a series of scrawled directives on the overhead, directives you can’t help obeying: “inhale,” “exhale,” “blink”. These further challenge the viewer to find new reactive space.

And space, already made multidimensional by the invocation of the theremin, is further activated with a white rope that Jones and Lynch hold between them, Jones running around on stage, Lynch running around at the top of the house, so that the rope zips over the heads of the audience. At times the rope illuminates perspective; at times it seems like the ray of seeing shooting out of one’s eye; at times it’s frightening, as it sweeps close overhead.

For all this invention and dislocation, RadioBrain eventually feels long, sinks into dull patches, and ends abruptly, suggesting an overall shapelessness. Still, there’s a lot to see—and hear.

While RadioBrain could just as well be billed as any sort of alternative performance, the SCREEN / the THING (originally created for Momentum in 2007 and revived here) is clearly dance. Still, it’s that sort of dance that might better be called movement. This is a finicky and somewhat silly distinction, but I think it’s useful here, so let me explain. Jones’s movement is derived from non-dance activities (operating Star Trek-like control panels, running, ordinary pedestrian movement, even bowling). To some extent, anyone could learn it; it doesn’t require specialized knowledge of body placement. This is not to say that performing Jones’s work is easy: it’s precise and exhausting, and performers must have the chutzpah to carry it through seriously (all Jones’s dancers have this in spades). Along with this utilitarian look comes a lack of expressed personality. You get the idea that these are not people so much as elements of a system: they might be atoms, or planets in orbit, or subatomic particles, which makes sense with the scientific bent of the SCREEN / the THING (seen in the epigraph, the stage trappings, and Lynch’s professor character, scooting around in his vintage office chair). In short, if dance to you suggests expressive, ecstatic, specialized motion, it won’t help you to look at this as dance.

Still, eventually your eyes adjust and you begin to see “dance” in Jones’s movement: a beautiful, difficult, but unobtrusive balance; the ravishing dynamics of a series of deliberate gestures. This slow shift of vision, this realignment, has nothing to do with any change in the movement. Instead, it arises only out of continued perception—suggesting that any system, any cosmos, will be found to have dance in it—that dance is a fundamental order of the universe.

Heady? Very. the SCREEN / the THING reminds me of 1980s Nova programs in its serious instruction, its air of a symbolic representation—allegory even seems like an apt word for this pinned-down, rather airless construction. I come away impressed, but tired, and a little bereft, like a child who’s gone without dessert.

What I’m missing is Jones himself (he doesn’t perform in the SCREEN / the THING). Jones moves in a wonderfully loose flux, his shoulders, wrists, neck, all his joints coming undone even in the simplest gestures. On him, this choreography would have air and then some. But Jones doesn’t seem to find his own looseness a necessary or even desirable element of his dance. Of the performers (all top-notch), only Kristin Van Loon and Max Wirsing exhibit this, and it’s clearly just natural to their forms, not intentionally pushed. Everyone else is tight, crisp, emphasizing order in each step. What I’m wanting is—I can’t help myself—a little more individual freedom, that welcome chaos that we know is also an element of this cosmos.

Through June 14 at The Southern.