H.Art Chaos is a clued-up modern dance company of women. The myriad questionnaire forms it distributes after every performance help it to read prevailing audience moods well enough to know that you can never generate as much enthusiasm for a full-length work as for two short snappy pieces bisected by a chunky interval.

Thus its debut of "Dolly" Nov. 10 at Setagaya Public Theater in Tokyo was buttressed by the premiere of "Sabaku no Naizo" (unfortunately translated as "Viscera of Desert").

Choreographer Sakiko Oshima has been acclaimed with great excitement on the company's recent tours of Canada, Europe and the U.S., and "Naizo" follows faithfully in the H.Art Chaos tradition of schlock characterization where the "baddies" get their just deserts. "Dolly," however, is a new and more abstract departure, along the lines of monochromatic glam dance with heavy dramatic lateral lighting -- and mercifully little over-the-top miming of cliched emotions or the running of hands through a well-styled hairdo.

The choreography remains stop-start speed movements, from one twisted position to the next, but is stripped of the showgirl element. The downside of this is a lot of rummaging around in sand.

When so many groups are following the choreographic path of sudden collapses en masse, severely contrasting lighting and extreme positions, there's little that can be called derivative, as this style seems to be more a broad movement than a plagiarization. But you can still make a case for the inherent meaning in a line of movement, for the dance that arises from the continuity of one movement phrase melting into another, for a style that employs the extremes and everything in between.

Naoko Shirakawa is the muse of the choreography and the company. Arguably one of Japan's top modern dancers, Shirakawa can only be faulted for cheap melodramatics, a tyrannical impulse for intensity and those over-the-head high kicks which would do better on the athletics ground than the artistic stage. But presumably this is dictated by the choreography, and Oshima pared all this down in "Dolly," which was danced to the onstage violin playing of Koichiro Muroya in a score by Yasuhiro Kasamatsu. Whether sitting mournfully on a box lit from within or careening from jumps into floor rolls and up again, Shirakawa set the pace and the intensity.

Overseas critics have hinged many an article on the gender makeup of the company, with feedback highlighting how a company of women can fight Japan's perceived sexism and expose gender myths unique to this society in their stage work. Well, most dance companies, here and overseas, have more female dancers than men -- just take a look at groups that have to import male guest stars or borrow them at exorbitant rates from other companies.

H.Art Chaos actually reinforces this often erroneous perception by dividing its eight dancers into equal numbers dressed in men's and women's clothing. The subgroups wear either red and black, or white and black, while Shirakawa is costumed in both opposing colors and frequently ends up in the last scene in an androgynous mixture of both, a la the delights of Takarazuka and other gender-disguising Japanese performers.

But a major part of Shirakawa's great stage presence is this very androgynous quality. When she dances topless, as happens frequently in Oshima's choreography -- just Shirakawa, interestingly enough, not the other dancers -- her tight torso, opening wide from Vivian Leigh waist to budlike breasts and wide shoulders, is further degendered as she flings her head back and bends backward in excellent limbo positions.

These cult-making solos in most productions get even more psychedelic to the accompaniment of a version of "Ave Maria," Shirakawa's arms waving frondlike, almost textureless, above her seemingly decapitated torso in an unfeigned religious intensity.

As in other successful productions, such as "Romeo and Juliet" and "Floating Angels," "Sabaku" made good use of harnesses that lift the dancers up so they seem to be flying in a nice kabuki touch. Oshima chose the outstanding Rachmaninov score "The Isle of the Dead" for this piece, which revolved around a birthday cake for Shirakawa, dancers flowing over furniture, performers maniacally trying to commandeer a computer and a finale with curtains of sand descending from the flies.

But apart from all the scurrying around in spotlit sand, it was "Dolly" that really showed the group's new direction and the increasing talents of dancers such as Yumiko Okuyama. The company plans to tour this work to Germany and Austria, and for once it should put paid to the hype about women in Japan -- onstage or not.